Arthur Weston
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2016
- Posts
- 18
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I have a Mont Blanc and it works magic!
Some kind of magic, indeed: I plied the CanJams in LA, SF, and Denver for a year auditioning amps for my thirsty and revealing 600Ω Beyers, and the diminutive Mont Blanc consistently came up a winner. My "replacement" A3 carries the spirit, but is a bit too polite in response and comes up short of the E12's dynamics (power). The audiophile rags harp about the big rigs' specs and ability to drive some of the hungriest planars, but the geeks at FiiO seem to have demonstrated a peculiar knack for wringing great performance out of some pretty simple semiconductors.I have a Mont Blanc and it works magic!
My E12's battery died so i kept using it plugged in for months now, it worked fine but occasionally outputs a loud noise when powered on right after plugging the power cable, it would go away simply by waiting a few seconds post plugging the power cable before turning on.OK, stakarVN - I broke the code Wednesday: all the images online of the battery wires show a single hard-soldered red and black wires - mine, like yours, has two thin black + two thin red terminated in a connector, which was introduced in later production. I dragged out my "needle" probes and determined that the two black are actually parallel - acting as s single conductor; same for red. In 3 exchanges with FiiO in the past week, I'm pretty certain that the battery (mine is now ZERO volts) is, indeed, probably an 11.1V. I'm convinced that dimensions & packaging won't permit 3 3.7 pancake cells stuffed in the E12 chamber, which ostensibly could be connected in series. So, since my E12 worked just fine until the battery failed, I'm gonna string 3 18650's in series and feed it into the case through a grommet. This won't work well for portability, but mine just sits next to my easy chair. In hindsight, I'm surprised they even fooled around with the "serviceable" connector, as difficult as it is to find a replacement battery & just access the battery itself.
Completely incidentally, my crawls through message boards on chips (wish I had the DIY E12!) indicates that the working voltages for chips run across a fairly broad range, so the ol' E12 circuit might still crank out sufficient sound levels for some with a lonely 3.7 pancake: I'll be checking that out in the next coupla weeks, too. Unfortunately, my 600Ω cans really need the 11.1V juice.