New toy - Hashimoto SUT

[montesquieu]

Tom, which setting did you prefer the Kansui with the hashimoto, low or high?

All the pundits told me low was supposed to be better ... I preferred high. At 16 ohm it's a bit of a toss-up, sitting in the middle ... I just felt there was more energy/musicality in the high setting. Either sounded balanced enough in terms of tone.

Strangely enough the Kansui (on the EAR 912 at least) prefers a 40 ohm setting which must be about 500 ohms (over the 12 ohm setting which you'd think would be closer).

[farflungstar]

Thanks tom - I need to let the Kansui bed in before forming an opinion on it - but switching to high I'd say the low setting has a little more depth but less sparkle - but it's too early to make judgements - it's only played 4 albums!

[montesquieu]

Thanks tom - I need to let the Kansui bed in before forming an opinion on it - but switching to high I'd say the low setting has a little more depth but less sparkle - but it's too early to make judgements - it's only played 4 albums!

It will take a bit of running in .... both of them actually .. best to reserve judgment for a while. Though your conclusion is similar to mine at least as regards sparkle/energy level.

As I mentioned it was literally months before the HM-7s came properly on-song.

[farflungstar]

I have to say that the HM-X really brought something to the Allaerts - balls and dynamics. I wouldn't run it straight into the Vida again. It turned an already superb transducer into a stunning one.

[RothwellAudio]

I wouldn't run it straight into the Vida again.

On this forum step-up transformers are treated as serious pieces of hi-fi but out there in the wider world you might be surprised how many people there are who think step-up transformers are just a cheap stop-gap to get you by if you only have an MM phonostage, and the best approach is get a "proper" phonostage which will do MC as soon as possible. Yet I've often advised people with an MM/MC phonostage to set it to MM and use a step-up transformer - more often than not they don't want to go back to an MC phonostage.

[RothwellAudio]

All the pundits told me low was supposed to be better ... I preferred high. At 16 ohm it's a bit of a toss-up, sitting in the middle ... I just felt there was more energy/musicality in the high setting. Either sounded balanced enough in terms of tone.

Strangely enough the Kansui (on the EAR 912 at least) prefers a 40 ohm setting which must be about 500 ohms (over the 12 ohm setting which you'd think would be closer).

My advice is to take all that ohms stuff with a pinch of salt. If a SUT has an input labelled "40 ohms", what does it actually mean? The answer is almost nothing. It certainly does not mean that the cartridge sees a 40 ohm load. It implies that that input is intended for a 40 ohm source, but that assumes an arbitrarily chosen bandwidth which is hardly ever stated. Do two different SUTs labelled as 40 ohms have the same turns ratio? Who knows?
And the "ohms" labelling completely disregards the output voltage of the cartridge. Take for example a Denon DL304 which has a 40 ohm impedance and a Benz Micro Gullwing with an impedance of 38 ohms (nearly the same). The Denon's output voltage is 0.18mV and and the Benz's output is 0.7mV. Are they equally compatible with a "40 ohm" SUT? Do they need the same turns ratio because they're the same impedance? Or, despite being the same impedance, do they need a different turns ratio because the output voltages are so different?
Personally, I think that labelling a SUT's inputs as "X ohms" is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. In the absence of any other information the best you can do is suck it and see.