Sold: Bottlehead S.E.X. with cap upgrades and tubes

Hey all!

I recently bought this amazingly modded Bottlehead S.E.X. from @bobboxbody (original posting here for full details: https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...head-sex-3-0-w-c4s-and-stupid-upgrades.12467/).

It is without a doubt one of the best headphone amps I've heard, and an excellent speaker amp for high efficiency speakers. However I've recently had a bit of a revelation about my relationship to gear and my system in general and I'm going a different route entirely, to something self powered and self contained, and I would love this bad boy to go to someone in the community who will give it the love it deserves.

I'm asking $675 net to me, which is what I paid with shipping, and I'm covering the shipping with that price point. This will also include all the tubes that were included when I bought the amp. CONUS only, Friends and Contributors get top priority.

Thanks for looking!

 

@rhythmdevils since you're obsessing over (ahem, I mean "exploring") amps lately, this one may be worth trying. From what I recall it should work well with orthos though I've never heard one and could be wrong.

 

I have no orthos to test it with but it's high powered and I suspect would be a good fit!

 

What is required to change it to from 4ohm usage to 8 ohm?

 

4ohm is the recommended wiring for this amp, it has the lowest noise floor and best control of the drivers. I ran 6 and 8ohm speakers on it with no problems and plenty of power for relatively sensitive speakers. For headphones I had good results with DCA aeon closed 2, and multiple ZMF's. My ESX900's(modded TH900) sounded good but there was some noise, which would get worse with 8ohm wiring, the fix for that is a pad for the hp output. That being said, rewiring for 8ohm would involve removing a couple of soldered connections on the transformers and moving them to the 8ohm taps.

 

I also ran this with 8 ohm efficient speakers and it sounded great.

This pairs exceptionally well with any of the 300 ohm Senns, cuts right through the veil on the 580/600/650 but without being so incisive that it would make the 600 feel too bright.

 

Quite possible RD has different taste than me, but this was my previous impression: "RD modded LCD-X seems to pair really nicely with my Bottlehead S.E.X. so far."

 

Cool it was quiet with my LCD-X too?

Would you (or anyone) mind commenting on its resolving ability?

 

The system I have my amp in is inherently noisy, either from lots of power line noise or RF from the computer. It's especially bad when the video card ramps up to 100% during gameplay, so not the greatest test of that. Still, the LCD-X was quiet when I wasn't playing games.

I did end up using the Roon DSP to drop the output to the DAC by 12 dB for headphone use because the amp is fairly high gain. You can pretty easily wire in a pad on the input side, or use in-line attenuators instead, but since my amp is used with speakers about 90% of the time I can use the additional gain.

I'm not the best to comment on resolution relative to other amps. I'm more sensitive to tonality than detail retrieval.

 

Sold to @jlucas! @shotgunshane @jexby please close.