short-lived ecstasy
UPDATE Luckily, it wasn’t so short-lived after all, the ecstacy continues!
Well… what to say? I just brought the STAX earspeakers back…
But, I can hear you think… Was there a problem? And if there was, haven’t you taken a look at it yourself first?
Well, as a matter of fact I did… Thereby probably losing all credit and such, but still… I guess I’m a warranty-voider by default and this is just a bad day…
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Even when I think of it now, I don’t think I did the wrong thing. Here’s the whole story in short.
Shortly after I got them, I got the feeling the left channel was different from the right. On a lower volume or sort of that it needed to be pumped up. Anyway, first I thought, maybe it’s in my cable or in my amplifier. Well, after quite some hours of trying everything (and some days in between too) I could only draw one conclusion, it’s in the box + earspeakers themselves. Sometimes I needed to nudge the balance a little to the left to be in harmony again, some other times I needed to crank it all the way to the left to get the feeling I had the same amount of pressure from both sides…
So, I thought about going back with these… but I’ve been looking around on the internet and there’s nowhere that parts for this model can be found anywhere. So my idea was, even if they would refund me, would I be happy? Euhm, no, I don’t think so, because I wanted these headphones to be good. So, what else can it be? Well, there’s a little box in between and that’s (sort of) standard electronics, so let’s have a look at that. And I did. Well, even though I didn’t see an obvious error, the soldering could use some resoldering… and then I thought, well, how many hours can this shop put into this, from a service point-of-view? Well, not many, I can tell you. They probably hardly made any money on these, if they even did, so how much time do you want to spend on it? And then I thought, well… I don’t have that problem and I started soldering… and soldering and soldering… I spent no less than 12 hours yesterday on my kitchentable (including breaks and such of course) to resolder each and every contact…
If the fault would’ve been in the soldering, I would’ve gotten it right… but, the fault wasn’t there. So… then I knew I was probably f**ked… I mean, if I hadn’t opened it in the first place, I could’ve brought it back on its 3 month guarantee from the shop (but then, they would be f**ked) Of course, I could’ve stepped into the shop and act like I didn’t know a thing, but that’s not me…
So, I just went back and told the complete story… and left the earspeakers there for now. They looked as much despaired as myself… (and a little bewildered too, I don’t think they ever had a customer who told them with a straight face that he resoldered the equipment he just bought…). I mean, this now probably is an all losers game. The earspeakers stopped functioning like they should. It’s in the electrostatic piece on the left side and there’s nowhere parts for these can be found… *sigh*
to get this straight, the earspeakers now function like they did and that’s still in a borked kind of way (it got worse through time). My soldering didn’t make it better, but also didn’t make it worse. I didn’t break a thing myself actually
Well, they told me that they’d discuss the whole situation. I told them I check back on them later this week. If there’s no solution to this, I don’t want the earspeakers back either. I will probably decide the universe didn’t want me to have these supadupa earspeakers…
to be continued?
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Well, I guess these are the most detailed pics of a STAX SR-5 gold online… when this is over, I can post more… For whoever wants to see them…
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That’s just bad.
I mean sorry to read this after so much enthusiasm.
I will stick to my Sennheiser HD-25-II.
But that Stax looked very promising…
Owww man… keep in the fight!! the good things that comes in easy way… goes in the same way…