I am now very impressed with this little box. However, getting to this point has been very different from the experience in most of the reports which I have read. Until a couple of days ago, I had thought I would be sending it back, with some story about my ears/amplifier/speakers being different from everybody else’s. However, quite suddenly things changed. I have not kept an exact tally, but the following timings (a mixture of actual running with data input, and just leaving on) are roughly right, for my A-B comparisons against my old Musical Fidelity X-DAC V3 (upgraded to Level 2 by Audiocom), using mostly CDs.
After 24hr:
Rather disappointing. An unaccompanied choral recording is very 2-D, cardboard cut-outs rather than singers, in comparison with the MF. Similar with string quartet, but not quite so marked difference. First trials of piano recordings very disappointing- in comparison with the MF the sound is just wrong- my wife said “artificial”, to me it’s as if the sound has been taken apart and not reassembled correctly.
After 48 hr, some improvement, not much, though the staging is getting better. Piano is still poor.
After maybe 80hr, with larger groups of instruments or voices the SQ is probably equal to the MF, and the staging is better, but piano, and solo violin, are still not right.
Somewhere around 90-100 hr all this undergoes a sudden transformation. The critical piano sound is now ahead of that from the MF, at least on DDD recordings. (So it’s not my ears after all….) However the older ADD transfers are still better handled by my old system- the effect of the M-DAC is a bit like removing the patina from an antique item of pewter- you can see the thing better, but the beauty has gone.
Another 50 hr, and finally I hear what everybody is enthusing about- even ADD solo piano are ok (part of me still misses the bit of ‘patina’ which is still not there, but the gain in precision and staging more than balances this). In the more than 40 year old Barenboim-Zuckerman-DuPré Beethoven recordings I hear things from the strings which I didn’t know were there (and incidentally, I hear for the first time that the recording balance is off by 1.5dB for Op97!)
I have not had the patience to read every entry, but has anybody else found the burn-in to be this slow? John, isn’t it a bit odd that there should be a fairly sharp change (I think within a couple of hours!)? I’d almost suspect a loose connection/dry joint, but there have been no signs of it wanting to go back to the previous ‘coarse’ sound.
As you might have gathered, I've bought it, and many thanks to Acton Gate Audio for letting me have it on trial for such a long time!