That's interesting. Can I ask this: do you think the unit will sound smoother with time due to changes in the unit, changes in your hearing, or a combination of the two?
Brain break-in in my experience is when you get two effects - better sensation of sound stage depth and better abilities to perceive the starting and stopping of notes.
On depth, I once added a book shelve, and depth collapsed. After about a month, the perception of depth came back - its as if my brain learnt the effects of the shelves, and took time to compensate for this. Now we know the brain has the ability to automatically compensate for different rooms and acoustics, so the perception of the acoustic space automatically compensates for changes in acoustic. For example, if you talk to somebody that is 5 feet away, in a large room, the voice is still 5 feet away even when you both move to a small room that is say very bright. The brain computes the acoustic space it is in, then compensates your perception of sound to suit the acoustics you are in. Now this is done very rapidly normally - but I think also that on the long term the brain is developing strategies to compensate. Now this is entirely speculation on my part, but it does make sense that the brain will continue to improve its abilities.
On the perception of starting and stopping of notes, I have also found long term improvements when I change the interpolation filters - better transient timing accuracy does take time to appreciate it. So I make an improvement, and you hear 75% of the improvement immediately. The last 25% or so takes a month or two - its as if the brain has strategies to deal with timing uncertainty, and these need to be changed with time - its almost as if you need to unlearn to deal with timing errors.
But on smoothness, I have never heard anything that could be put down to brain break-in - its bright or smooth and it will determine that immediately. So smoothness changes are due to hardware changes.
With Dave, I have no evidence that it will get smoother or warmer with time - and I suspect that if it does change, it is small.
Rob,
I thought you were trekking the globe with a production DAVE all along.
Now, has there been any changes to the production DAVE in 2016?
paul
Hmmm - it was the first from the first production batch, but needed a bill of materials (BOM) change, as some components needed changing. So the PCB was full production. There have been no SQ significant changes to PCB or BOM subsequently.
That said, we are talking about small differences here, not something you would notice after a few days, only on a direct AB test.
Rob
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