So, you want a portable rig with grunt ...

[grevillea]

I guess what really blew me away about this was how good the end result looks, even if you'd have to be mentally ill to try to use the resulting stack on anything less than a desk.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/521680/fiio-e9-review/1050 (scroll down till you reach the photos)

[Drubbing]

Wow, so portable...

[kelvinyap9]

Perfectly fine to fit in my pocket.

Actually no, Sansa Clip+ and an Audio-Technica ATH-ES7 is all I need, thanks.

[grevillea]

Lets just think of it as a 'proof of concept', but its not too far off what some of the crazies on HF have done with the CLAS stack. At least this guy didnt spend another thousand on cables/new phones to be able to tell the world that he has a 'fully balanced portable rig' ....

[Marcus]

I'll stick with my Sansa clipped to my headphones.

[Belial]

You could just take the ipod and 98% of the time not tell the difference...

Insanity

Ben

[Drubbing]

At least this guy didnt spend another thousand on cables/new phones to be able to tell the world that he has a 'fully balanced portable rig' ....

So we should admire his relative restraint?

Gather 'round kiddies and I'll tel you a story from the war...

Way back in a cold, windy place, long long ago, I had a Sony Walkman. It took cassettes (Google it). They played for 45 mins per side, then you turned it over and played the other. With the jeans of the day, it was impossible to carry more than 2. It took AA batteries and they lasted 3-4 hours max - if you didn't crank it.

It was the size of half a brick and half as heavy. The headphones were strands of bendy metal with cups covered in foam. They were all open - nothing else on the market would fit a Walkman. Everyone got your tsk tsk tsk tsk even at barely audlible volumes. They sounded shit, the headphones weren't great and cassettes sucked just as badly.

Now we can all get 10X the sound quality and 100X the amount of music, in a gadget the size of a badge.

And Protools like "Mr Portable and his little Rig" come along and make some of us oldies realise how spolied we've all become, by ignoring all that and taking us back to 1982. For probably a very small gain in SQ over that from a device that pops in your pocket, but with added hassle and masses of completey unusable volume.

[Blobby]

I used to check out the threads of head-fiers showing pictures of their portable rigs. That one takes the cake though.

[Blobby]

............It took cassettes (Google it). They played for 45 mins per side, then you turned it over and played the other.........

45 min cassttes? Bloody luxury. You should've tried the 90 min/side ones. Lasted one listen of one side and then ended up as a tangled mass inside the Walkman. People used to have fun pulling out whatever remained and throwing it out the car window. There were always reams of cassette tapes blowing in the wind on the sides of roads everywhere.

[Marcus]

My walkman had auto reverse, bitches. No switching sides for me!

[Blobby]

I remember the auto reverse ones. Bloody confusing. Never knew which way the cassette was running. So fast forward was backwards or vice versa and by the time you'd stopped, switched the other way the cassette was tangled up and and out the car window it went. If it did last for more than one listen the tape was so stretched that the music would drop in pitch by a semi tone or more. That was OK though, just more tape to throw out the car window.

[GougMan]

Oh yes the good ol days - I still have my second Walkman lying around somewhere and I tried it not long ago and it still works fine !! I still have some of these "cassettes" and I even had a couple of Metal ones (as opposed to the Chromium Dioxide or Normal type) that needed to switch to a special setting on the old tape player.

I had a couple of 10 minute cassettes but most of the ones I used were 60 or 90 minutes but I was told that anything above that meant the tape had to be extra-thin to fit into a standard cassette shell and that's why they were more prone to breakage

The other thing I noticed was that the sound quality when using the auto reverse function was not as good as when playing the tape in the normal direction. May just have been the tape player I was using ...

[grevillea]

As kids, we would spend those long. boring Summer holidays walking up and down the highway (!) looking for discarded coke bottles to collect the deposit on. If there was a similar deposit on discarded cassettes with tape spewing forth from their innards, I might have an island hideaway similar to Marcus' .....

On a more sombre note, you have to wonder how many accidents were caused by people fumbling with the dreaded cassette player when Barry Manilow at '33rpm' suddenly became The Chipmunks at '78rpm'. Yep, nothing like analog sources back in the good old daze, er, days .....

[Blobby]

As kids, we would spend those long. boring Summer holidays walking up and down the highway (!) looking for discarded coke bottles to collect the deposit on............

Humble beginnings for a man who ended up buying a pair of K601s.

[grevillea]

As kids, we would spend those long. boring Summer holidays walking up and down the highway (!) looking for discarded coke bottles to collect the deposit on............

Humble beginnings for a man who ended up buying a pair of K601s.

A pair ? Hang on, I think you are confusing me with grev (no relation - he was adopted !)