Jeff Rowland's Continumm

Dave,

in the end I have to trust my ears. I know "pro" reviewers and even equipment designers believe in break in. Let me ask you a question. Say I took 2 identical continuum integrated amps, and broke only one of them in...could you listen to both and reliably tell me which one was broken in and which one was not ?

Perhaps you can, or you believe you can (it is immaterial if you can or think you can....what matters is that you think you can) tell the difference. Also, you probably have better hearing since you are a musician. I am not sure I can tell the difference. Hence my scepticism about break-in.

And no offense taken about your advice. However, I will say this...if Jeff believes his equipment needs break-in, he should certainly put it in his manual. Has someone asked Jeff about his opinion about equipment break-in ?

Yes, I have. Jeff has in fact suggested that significant breakin may needed because of power supplies, transformers and other components being initially 'magnetized'. As such, Jeff was not at all surprised that even the 312 I have in the system, which is not at all new with several thousand hrs of operation, but had been in storage then truck plane/cold/vibration for a spell required several hundred hrs to restabilize. Rod and Mark at Soundings also suggested to me that Capri -- like most other pres -- may require over 500 hrs of operations to stabilize.

Comparing a well broken in Capri or any other device with its counterpart fresh off the factory floor would be a fascinating experiment. If I have the opportunity I will attend it. . . no need to put too much effort into making it a blind experiment either, all Capris look identical to me, regardless of livery.

G.

Very funny G. We're all looking forward to "blind testing" you the next time you're in Colorado. Please forgive me.

Jeff's manuals actually say that his components should sound good right out of the box, but when you talk to him personally he thinks that there's is indeed a difference after burn-in. Just last week he theorized that it's mainly due to dielectrics taking a stabilizing charge over a period of time.

I think I could hear the difference between a brand new Continuum and mine with a few hundred hours on it. Both would have to be plugged in for an hour or two to stabilize first, because the few times I've turned it off it took hours to sound its best again. Still, that would be harder than hearing the difference between new Analysis Plus Solo Crystal Oval 8 speaker wire and the same wire after burn-in. That's a very dramatic change.

The JRDG stuff tends to sound pretty good right out of the box. As Guido mentioned earlier, he thinks that his Ref 3 went through a much more dramatic transformation, so YMMV, depending on what you're listening to.

Pinkus, I think that your muscian point is valid. We're not the only ones that can hear and I've seen audiophiles train their ears to be more acute over time. Still, it's like anything else, the more you work at it, the better you get and musicians spend hours daily or weekly on just such things and we constantly hear things without electronic "stress". The more you hear the "without" the easier it is to hear the "with".

Dave

Hi Dave, I just read yesterday that -- according to an official personnel training document on the 2008 Bejin Olympics site, the politically correct term is now 'optically disabled'. Suchly, next Fall in Denver, I'll be delighted to participate to any optically disabled test. test

I'm finding Colorado, by and large, a little more politically correct than Texas, as you might imagine. (If we could throw out the Republic of Boulder we would swing way back toward "normal"). Anyway, that 'optically disabled' handle is a new one on me. As I consider it, there may have been a time or two in the past when I might have temporarily qualified. That somehow doesn't seem right, since I still don't even have glasses at age 60.

It's interesting how society struggles to name disabilities. For instance, "blind" seems like an absolute to me, but then they came up with "legally blind" to describe something less than complete. Now we have this term "optically disabled" attacking from the other end of the spectrum, covering everything from being a little "foggy" in the morning to the absolute, which I suppose we're not allowed to call "blind". Now we'll need a whole set of sub-modifiers to "classify" everyone within the OD category.

Sorry, way OT. Let the thread continue-um. (Pun intended, duh).

Dave