CanJam SoCal 2016: Portable tubes with Woo Audio





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Seal_FINAL_CanJamSoCal2016Woo Audio, purveyor of fine tubed gear for the discerning head-fi’er, have finalized their portable — the WA8 Eclipse ($1,619 Black or Sliver, $1,709 Gold — but note that these are intro prices, which will jump in April!).

The Eclipse runs three tubes (two 6S31B, one 6021) via a lithium battery, but a switch allows you to select the two/three tube path to tweak the signature for IEMs or other headphones. Think: quieter | more/less lush.

The DAC section features a ES9018K2M chip, and is fully compliant with 24bit/384kHz file resolution. There are outputs for 1/4″ and 1/8″.

Battery life is about 4 hours, unfortunately. That’s a lot of fire and decoder to support, so expect to need backup or access to a plug for those long flights. Given the robustness of the enclosure — it’s hefty quite solid in the hand — I’m guessing that this is targeted more at the transportable than truly portable, though I suppose “fire in your pocket” is still totally do-able. Think of it as an ultra-compact Fireflys.

Noble Audio
Noble Audio is a proud sponsor of CanJam SoCal 2016 and Part-Time Audiophile

Brian Hunter of Audio-Head has a nice unboxing vid you can catch, here:

Also in the room was the monster of headphones, the Abyss AB-1266 (review here), hanging off a pair of WA5LE v2 headphone amplifiers (review here). This was a dead-sexy combo, all power and grace, and a must-hear for the desktop dominant. Tour-de-force sound quality here.

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About Scot Hull 1063 Articles
Scot started all this back in 2009. He is currently the Publisher here at PTA, the Publisher at The Occasional Magazine, and the Executive Producer at The Occasional Podcast. There are way too many words about him over on the Contributors page.