Happy new year 2015 to you all!!
I hope you have an enjoyable Christmas and New Year Holidays.
It was quite an experience in listening to Christmas music while burning in the modified SBL xovers
..it was fun and frustrating at times but at the end it was worthwhile and enlightening one.
So
below is my burn in experience..:
The first 10-15 minutes: The sound was very nice, clear,not grainy, lots of PRaT, a definite improvement over the old crossover. Then the next half hour or so the sound suddenly became muddy, slow, no pace, unbelievable ugly, lack of top end, bottom end was grainy.
Then suddenly the Top End came back. It was like someone lifted a veil going from the left speakers to the right speakers. A rollercoaster ride for the 1st hour.
From the next hour to the next 30 hours it was all the fun : grainy not grainy, PRaT no PRaT, Muddy Clear, Coarse mids Lovely mids. But there was incremental improvement to the sound for every block of 10 hours or so of burn in time. The first 10 hours was frustrating but at the 20th hour there is a tiny light at the end of the tunnel.
At more or less 30 hours the highs becomes clear and mids starts to flow nicely.
At 40 hours the bass becomes clear and tight.
Then comes the delightful 45th hour of burn in
. PRAT came back!
Then
.. the Magical 48th hour
.its ALIVE
now SBL sounded very very good.
Details are there (tons of details were not presented by the old xover), Bass is tight, human voice sounds more natural. Tweeter brightness/forwardness is much reduced (Naim CDX is now much more fun to listen to). Overall it was an excellent improvement over the original (Old 17 years!) crossover. At least to my ears it was at least as good as going from bare nac72 to nac72+Hicap. It gives me a direction on how much can be improved from Stock components and how it impact the sound quality.
I am only using so-so quality films caps for now (SCRs and Wondercap). I can only imagine how much improvement can be achieved once good quality components is in the crossover such as ESA Claritycap, Mundorf Silver Oil, good resistors, and coils.
I wonder do resistors and coils need to be burn-in as well?
Many thanks,
David