I now have over 400 hours on my M35s and I would consider them fully burned in. It there are any further changes I suspect neither my audio memory nor my listening skills will be acute enough to notice them. During the first 100ish hours I struggled to articulate a deficiency I was hearing in the speakers. Essentially, a lot of acoustic music wasn't as satisfying or as rich sounding as I recalled. I tried to describe that as the music seeming thinner and notes having a shorter decay and less reverb but I wasn't really happy with the words I was using to try to describe what I felt I was missing. Now I am confident that deficiency was solely due to not enough burn in. For the past couple of weeks I have been catching up on listening to vinyl that I had ordered from Discogs, but didn't play while I was trying to rack up hours on the M35s when I listened primarily to streaming. I picked up a handful of Windham Hill releases that I hadn't listened to since I was a young man. As vapid as the music sometimes is, the Windham Hill records have exceptional production values and the vinyl sounds fantastic.
That is a long set up for my point. Now that the M35s are fully burned in, I have been marveling at what a fantastic job they are doing playing those well recorded Windham Hill records. Now the guitars, pianos, violins and other stringed instruments are rich and resonant, each note is fat and palpable and fully defined and placed in space. The decay of a plucked guitar string seems to go on forever as does the resonance of a piano note. And that is all occurring in the pristine, transparent, layered, tonally pure space where the M35 are outperforming my Magnepan 20.7s which were no slouch in that respect. The fact that the M35s have excellent bass, that goes well below the frequency cutoff of the 20.7s, is one of the things that contributes to that overall sense of coherence and richness. Listening to these records on the M35s elevates the music considerably.
That is a long set up for my point. Now that the M35s are fully burned in, I have been marveling at what a fantastic job they are doing playing those well recorded Windham Hill records. Now the guitars, pianos, violins and other stringed instruments are rich and resonant, each note is fat and palpable and fully defined and placed in space. The decay of a plucked guitar string seems to go on forever as does the resonance of a piano note. And that is all occurring in the pristine, transparent, layered, tonally pure space where the M35 are outperforming my Magnepan 20.7s which were no slouch in that respect. The fact that the M35s have excellent bass, that goes well below the frequency cutoff of the 20.7s, is one of the things that contributes to that overall sense of coherence and richness. Listening to these records on the M35s elevates the music considerably.
