Yes, I've seldom had a reports of quiet such a harsh sounding initial sound - maybe your system is more revealing than most?
I hope the engineering team came back after a bit of burn-in to hear it's development?
Yes 48 to 100 hours is needed before full burn-in.
Or, could it be a narcissistic personality disorder? What would Occam say? Yup, about an hour is where I tend to hear components sounding better. Every single component I've built myself has had a pretty huge burn-in change. Many may never experience this depending on how much testing is done by the mfg'r. The cable I posted measurements of is similar, it changes pretty radically during the first few hours, but also more subtly improves over hundreds of hours. Most wire doesn't have a burn-in this extreme, but it seems all/most components do. I would agree with Amir that this initial burn-in should be done by the mfg'r, burning in my cables has made things much easier for both myself and my customers. Of course going from getting a lot of comments and concerns about burn-in before I got my cable cooker and none after is also evidence...
Well, let me make you feel better then. There is no way, no how I believe any DAC no matter what the price, when plugged in sounds "screetchy." I am confident that in a blind test your customer would not have been able to identify your DAC let alone be able to determine it was screetchy. These are faulty subjective evaluations which must be dismissed instead of building a house of cards on them by assuming they are correct. A more polite version of this is what you should have told him. That nothing can possibly electrically change in a DAC in 1 to 4 hours to deliver the transformation he thought he heard. That we are unfortunately routinely wrong at these evaluations.
That's right. And I quoted Doug himself saying exactly that. Here it is again:
You seem to be so focused on one word, screechy. Why make a big deal out of the one word, what is the problem? What was posted by John makes perfect sense and I believe just like anyone with some common sense would believe is true. When first turned on the DAC did not sound that good and after burn in sounded excellent. Such a simple fact, why all the talk about everyone being delusional and blind testing, please. I've heard this with equipment that I've used, just as most of us have. In an earlier post I mentioned Schiit Audio and what they say regarding their DACs. Do you think they would say this if it was not true, I think Mike Moffat knows a bit more about digital audio than you do, so if you have something you can give us that has some first-hand real world information please go right ahead. Just speculating on what other people can or cannot hear, and different type of testing to prove them wrong really does not cut it.
John, you have been pretty game putting out a product which you know will sound so different, depending on the final system, and how the customer approaches listening to it - years ago, I thought a lot about creating a complete system and marketing it, but the fragility of getting acceptable, to me, sound in every reasonable situation stopped it ever happening. So, a big tick from me !!
John, you have been pretty game putting out a product which you know will sound so different, depending on the final system, and how the customer approaches listening to it - years ago, I thought a lot about creating a complete system and marketing it, but the fragility of getting acceptable, to me, sound in every reasonable situation stopped it ever happening. So, a big tick from me !!
We are saying the same thing, John, just in different ways. The point being, that the DAC gets out of the way - therefore, any system "sound" is due to issues elsewhere in the setup. My way is to say that components have no sound, or such should be so - the job is to eliminate all the "injected" spurious characteristics. SD card players can be brilliant - because, they're so simple! It's the debugging where the action is, as you say ...
Hi Bob. Without knowing it, you are actually arguing my response that you quoted. That there was no way, no how the customer had such a horrible experience when he first turned that DAC on. That is why I put zero, let me repeat, zero weight on that word. With some rare exceptions, today's DAC *devices* are built on DAC *integrated circuits* that are so good that you really can't screw them up that way. And their spec sheet mentions no word whatsoever about the need for burn-in.
And I trust you that you have as have others. No disagreement on that. The issue is working backward, without technical knowledge and that of psychoacoustics, and coming up with a technical explanation of cause and effect. Study of the former would say what I explained above. Study of the latter would tell you the elasticity of our hearing system. We don't hear the same over time. You can listen to a piece of music 100 times and at episode 101 hear a note you did not. That note was always there. Your brain simply did not focus on it to hear it. This should make common sense to you.
I don't know Mike Moffat personally so I take your word for it that he knows more than me. What I won't take though the assessment that we should to what he says because I happen to have first hand experience with one of his products. My son bought one of their $400 DACs and unfortunately it lived up to the derogatory version of their company name when it came to both subjective and objective performance. My son reported that he could hear the activities of his computer through the DAC when he was playing games! Let me repeat: despite spending $400 on a stand-alone DAC, the noise from his PC was readily travelling through this DAC.
