Friends,

From June 29 – July 17th, we will be out of the office. Due to the location of the vacation, we might not be able to return calls or answer email. Thanks for your business.

It has been known that we at “Ray Samuels Audio” offer special on our products during the Holiday Season hoping to bring joy and happiness to all.

We have chosen three of our products at a very special price.

F-117, THE NIGHTHAWK, phono stage

It is one of the best selling phono stage ever. $100.00 off, of the regular price, this offer is good through Christmas only. We are offering 100 units only.

F-35, THE LIGHTNING, fully balanced headphone amp

It is the smallest fully balanced headphone amp ever built. $100.00 off of the regular price, with 100 units available, the sale will go through Christmas.

THE SHADOW, the smallest portable amp ever built by RSA

With digital volume control, it has the purest sound with no capacitors in the signal path. $100.00 off of the regular price, we have 100 units available for sale through Christmas.

Peace & love to all…

RSA

On holiday special, we are now offering our top-of-the-line phono stage amp, the XR-10B for $3500 shipped. (Regular price is $4500 + shipping.) There are only 6 units available, ready to ship, so act quick to reserve yours.

Check out the XR-10B product page for pictures and more info »

F-35, The Lightning, The Smallest, Fully balanced, Input To Output Portable Headphone Amp In The World.

The Lightning is ready to ship. Reserve yours today! Only 200 units for the $499 intro price.

Check out the Lightning product page for pictures and more info »

The Intruder is a fully balanced portable amp, input to output, designed to drive ALL the phones including the most difficult the HE-6 by Hi Fi Man.

Check out the Intruder product page for pictures and more info »

In the last eight years I have been in business I have trusted all headfiers & friends who send me personal checks for the products that they purchase. Never had any of those checks returned to me for in sufficient funds. You might call me names for my full trust in people I do not know or have never met , but I do ship the products with out waiting for the checks to clear or even before the checks arrive.

Mr. Darnell e-mailed asking for fast shipping because it is his birthday and he wanted the amp & the LOD cable to get to him as fast as possible. The package arrived to him before I knew that his check had no value. My bank charged me extra money for his bounced check. When getting in touch with Mr. Darnell, he tried to avoid all my e-mail which ended with this post on my web site. I only posted this so other manufacturer won’t do business with him nor should any person buy any amps from him as his amp won’t be under warranty. Sadly I have to drop the shipping habit of any product, from now on, until the checks are cleared.

The first 10 units have been sold long time ago.

Headfonia Review

Check out the Dark Star product page for pictures and more info »

Emmeline SR-71B – Quad mono fully balanced, input-output, portable amp.

Old SR-71B Preorder Page

There is nothing out there to even come close to what the SR-71B can offer. The state of the art fully differential input to output with best audio specs ever when it comes to low noise, bandwidth, slew rate & dynamics. Four independent op-amps with the lowest input noise & excellent audio performance are used in the gain stages, two for each channel giving you three independent gains per channel. The Buffer stage has four independent buffers, two per channel with a great drive capability & current handling. Making this portable balanced amp the most powerful Amp ever designed. The topology of four independent mono channels make it unique & a must hear to believe. There is no headphone ever made that SR-71B can’t drive with great authority & control. It will stand toe to toe with best balanced home amps out there. It can swing in balanced mode more than 26V p-p. SR-71B uses, custom designed for RSA, four Lithium Ion battery pack that when fully charged you have 16.8 volts DC. SR-71B can swing more than 12-14 volts p-p in single ended, making it excellent performer to drive HD 600/650.

We have implemented a custom designed “Alps” volume control with four independent resistive sections, two for each channel, with dual shafts, each two resistive sections are controlled by one shaft. This will give many listeners out there the ability to balance the left & right channels independently according to their hearing. You might not believe this but more than 80% of the people can’t equally hear from both ears. Also many analog players might not give you equally balanced signals. Music files might not have been recorded with perfect left & right amplitude of signal strength, this dual mono high quality POTs configuration makes it a great feature for many out there.

SR-71B has both fully balanced input signal that is processed that way from the input to output, and the single ended 3.5mm input connector. We use 2 balanced connectors, the same as the Protector’s balanced connector. One is for the balanced input signal, on the rear panel, the second is on the front panel, for the balanced output. Balanced input signal from any true balanced player will be handled all the way through in fully balanced till it reaches the balanced headphone output connector. The single ended headphone jack will still be active BUT it will carry only single ended signal.

SR-71B handles the single ended signal in a different way. The fully balanced differential chip converts the single ended signal into a balanced signal with opposite polarity. This signal is passed to four independent gain stages then to four buffers. This means your balanced outputs connector will ALWAYS have balanced signal at output no matter what the input signal is and ALWAYAS have the single ended signal at the 3.5mm headphone jack no matter what input signal might be.

Ten of the BEST state of the art op-amps & buffers are being used in the design. No compromise in quality of resistors or caps. Mil spec PC board well implemented components location & lanes makes this design having the lowest noise floor ever built. All these chips are high voltage chips used in the best sound reproduction components.

With all that much circuitry, dual pots, double gain switches, two balanced connectors, two SE connectors, balanced & SE switch selector, DC input jack, on/off LED & on/off switch, this balanced amp must be real big in size, right? The truth is that it is shorter than SR-71A by ½”, 3.25” in length, .7” in height & 2.25” in width. This is a portable amp that has it all, Quality in workmanship, sound reproduction and all that your heart desires in bells & whistles, all in a small portable package.

RSA

Click here for The SR-71B product page »

Last year I received a PM from a head-fier gbx2006 who sent this link http://www.aaroncake.net/circuits/volume.asp and asked me if I would consider digital volume control to make the P-51 even thinner. I told him I was already working on it but with a control with higher quality and usability for audio than in the link, and it was called The Shadow.

If you think the Emmeline P-51, Mustang, is very, very small, think again. The new volume control allows me to not only make The Shadow even smaller but also improve performance and usability.

Currently one disadvantage of the portable amps, especially when used with the very sensitive IEMs,is the quality & the balance of their volume controls. Without strict testing and selection analog volume controls are a big pain, they don’t track properly, and they don’t give the proper sound stage & the correct location of musicians & instruments. The most popular disappointment is when one channel tends to start before the other. Dust & contamination tends to cause cuts & drops of audio signal in one channel or the other.

Because of such careful selection I have more than 3000 miniature Alps volume controls that have been rejected sitting in a box. They don’t track properly. They are money down the drain. I pay dearly for 1200 pots every time I order them and they are not returnable.

Not only is the money wasted but so is the time that it takes me to sort out the 600 good & acceptable pots out of the 1200 units. This make me sick knowing that there is no other alternative to get miniature pots from another company that takes pride in designing better ones.

For The Shadow I have been fiddling so far with three different DIGITAL VOLUME CONTROLS & listening to them for the last 7 months or more & found one that is much better than others. I have come to enjoy the one I have right now.

More info will be available with the picture of the production PC of The Shadow amp in few days.

Ray Samuels Audio.

Click here for the Shadow product page »

The product page has some photos of my new electrostatic amp. More details to follow.

Click here for the A-10 product page »

We are proud to announce the arrival of the newest edition to the RaySamuelsAudio line, the SR-71A!

We sold the last SR-71 about nine months ago. Unfortunately, parts became unavailable for that period of time. There was still a great demand for the SR-71 but we couldn’t do anything about it. During this time many ideas came to mind. One of them was to make the SR-71 a more flexible amp by adding a three-position gain switch, this way we would not need to modify the amp for those who want to use it for low-impedance IEMs, or for those who want to use the high-impedance full-size headphones like the Sennheiser HD-6XX family—this is what we did…

Click here for the SR-71A product page »

The A-10, fully balanced electrostat headphone amp, is in the work, The prototype has been going a lot hours of testing & stress, it sounds amazing. Here are some informations regarding the design for those who might be interested. The A-10 has Two balanced inputs and three single ended, balanced & single ended tape loop, balanced & SE pre-amplification output. Balanced DAC Attenuator with four sections. Two chassis design, one for the amp the other hosts the power supply. Custom manufactured to our specs, PLITRON, toroidal power transformer. Two output jacks, one for the HE-90, the other for Stax SR-007 We are working on the PC brds at the moment. Ray Samuels Audio…

The Apache, pre-amp/headphone amp, is a fully balanced dual mono product. It has two balanced and two non-balanced inputs. Balanced and non-balanced, active pre-amplification plus balanced and non-balanced headphone jacks.

The Apache utilizes four sections, balanced DACT, as an attenuator, customized to fit directly on a military specs printed circuit board. The components quality used on the pc brd are of the highest military specs, like “Dale Vishay” resistors with accuracy of .1% tolerance.

Specification (amp section)

• Input impedance 50K
• Output impedance 2-2K

Click here for the Apache product page »

Ray Samuels Audio is proud to announce its latest state of the art component:

The Emmeline II, “B-52” fully balanced Headphone amplifier and full functioning preamplifier.

It has been a long time since we have displayed the prototype B-52 in its silver non-anodized chassis at the 1st annual Head-Fi National meet. Since then we have re-worked the entire chassis over again to give it a better, more professional and functional look. In the process, both of the internal PC boards were redesigned in order to accomplish a higher quality of workmanship and to implement a newer custom built toroidal transformer which was designed exclusively to our specs, for the necessary voltage, current output and physical size, that we needed to attain our goals by one of the most respected manufacturers of power transformers in the world, Plitron.

Click here for the B-52 product page »