Bottlehead Kits > Stereomour II

Impedance switch for SII?

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Deke609:


--- Quote from: Paul Joppa on April 13, 2015, 04:13:51 PM ---The Stereomour II ... retains the OT-2 output transformer, which has been quite successful. That means the impedance switch upgrade kit will also be available.

--- End quote ---

Based on what I read in other earlier threads, it sounds like this is the same impedance switch kit used with the Smack, S.E.X. and SI.  If so, are any of those kits still available - or even just the board and the manual?

I'm going to be experimenting with different impedances on my SII and a switch would be great for this. 

Many thanks,

Derek

denti alligator:
Ditto, I would buy one.

Natural Sound:
I asked about this a while back. I was told that the impedance switch kit was discontinued.

denti alligator:
It was never available for Stereomour II, though.

Paul Birkeland:
The answer to this is multi-faceted, and I'm sure I'll forget a few along the way and others can chime in. 

The Impedance Switch kit took a bunch of these little PC board mount slide switches, and they always seemed to either be out of stock or maybe there would be 3-4 available at a given vendor when we needed to order them.  When we released the kit originally, this part was well stocked at several different vendors by the hundreds.  There's nothing worse than having someone's Steromour packed and ready to ship but the switches for the Impedance Switch kit add on are back ordered for three weeks. 

The manual was another conundrum.  The Impedance Switch kit went with Stereomour I, Sex 2.1, and Smack (not as an option, but rather it came with the Smack).  Making a single manual for an upgrade that goes into multiple kits is pretty difficult, as is supporting this as the products develop.  As anyone who has installed the Impedance Switch kit in a SEX can tell you, the manual was already a bit jumbled just based on the variations of the SEX 2 that were floating around; adding a 3rd would have made the manual even more difficult to follow.  We would have also needed to add instructions for the Steremour II and the Seductor, so now we are up to three variations of the SEX amp (maybe 4 since you can put the iron upgrade in a SEX 2.0), two different Stereomours, and the Seductor.  This is not tenable.

Operator error also seemed to creep up a bit.  I know Doc B. will even admit that we (Doc B would tell you that it was probably me) would accidentally bump those switches underneath when moving gear around for a demo, and it's really embarrassing to have to debug why you have channel imbalance during a demo when an amp permanently wired at 8 ohms would never run into that problem.  If this caught us off guard periodically, how many headaches are we generating for everyone else with this kit?

The issue I would bring up is actual performance.   As I have mentioned on other threads, we actually eliminated instructions for anything other than 4 and 8 ohm operation in the SEX 3 manual to eliminate the repetitive threads of Grado/IEM users wiring their amps at 32 ohms and wondering why they hear hiss and why they can only turn up the volume knob two degrees before the amp is at full volume.  The available power on the 4 and 8 ohm taps is sufficient for 99.9% of the headphones out there and the noise floor is beautifully low in these configurations.

(I would mention that I haven't ever found a use for the 32 ohm setting)

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