A Geek Goes Flying

Shelf over the Schiit Jotunheim amplifier Bedside. I got a great price on an older Jotunheim (not the Jotunheim 2) with the AK4490 DAC card installed, that I couldn’t pass up. This is for more casual listening; music while reading before bed, maybe the occasional TV show or online lecture series or whatever before bed. (I know I maybe shouldn’t , but, here we are.) But my bedside table is getting a little crowded. At first I put this shelf over the amp, but that put my Belkin charger a bit too high for my iPhone in ___ mode to be effective, so I returned to the well and picked up another 10" square aluminum plate to build another small aluminum shelf to put over the amp. This time I used 4" legs for air flow ( 2/7 x 4 inch Sign Standoff Screws ), since the Schiit is passively cooled and the vents are on the top (the mac mini has a fan and vents out the back, so I wasn’t as worried about leaving space above it). Drill bits to poke holes in the aluminum. It’s a little wobb...

The Audeze MM-100 comes with only a “2.5m (8.2ft) Single ended 3.5mm TRS to 1/4" TRS” cable ( seen here ). There are various ways to set it up to run balanced ( detailed in this video ), including, e.g., something like this $113 Fostex ET-RPXLR OFC Balanced Cable for T60RP Studio Headphones, XLR Connector (after apparently partially frying my Magnius amp by disconnecting a 4.4 mm cable from an XLR4 adapter while the amp was powered on ‡ , I’m leery of the multi-part options Zadius Tech links to). But the Hart Audio Cables modular system seems to be the most elegant and flexible, and not too dear. I’ve started with: Hart HC-2 cable and interconnect Multi-Kit with Hard Case HC-2: 3.5mm TRRS Balanced Modular Headphone Cable , a 3.5 mm TRRS connector for the headphones terminating in a Mini XLR 4-pin connector that works with Hart’s interconnects ; and Custom Hybrid Metallic Multi-Kit With Hard Case , which (roughly) includes: IC-2-T Threaded 3.5mm TRS + screw-on 1/4" adapter ...

On a whim I added the Meze 99 Classics to my Amazon cart, ‘cause they were “only” like $200. Then they reset to $309 and I forgot about them, moved them to “save for later.” A quick peak at camelcamelcamel showed they basically never went on sale, so I’d either imagined it or I wasn’t fast enough. Until... Burning the midnight oil the next day or so, I saw the pop-up that the price had gone down - to $219. There’d been some recent discussion on r/headphones that intrigued me, so I grabbed a pair. A couple of hours later they were back up to $309 and I haven’t seen them drop lower since. (An alternative: The Meze 99 Neo , specific for drop.com, are apparently indistinguishable from the Classics aside from the colorway, and are currently $179, down from $199.) (As of this writing, they’re $219 again; it’s 1:53 a.m., maybe there’s a pattern here?) I don’t have any closed back headphones I listen to regularly. (I use the Ultrasone Pro 580i for video editing etc., but they’re a little too ...