My Transporter sounded awful out of the box, and if burn-in wasn't happening, it would have been returned by now. Out of the box, the mids are recessed. Bass is a smeared "one-note" affair that doesn't integrate with any of the higher frequencies. After a few hours, the mids start coming forward, and the bass begins to show some definition. That is, you can actually hear the string being plucked or picked, as opposed to simply the presence of bass noise. And no, the increased definition in the low end isn't placebo. As the unit gets some playing hours, there is definition present that simply wasn't there before. At this stage of things, I'd rate the Transporter as a better sound than my Ack! dAck!, but not up to the Bel Canto DAC2 yet. Nowhere close to any of my other sources (VPI Scoutmaster, Ariston RD11s, Meridian G08, Exemplar Denon 2900, Wadia 301). However, it's still early in the burn-in process, and it's still changing. Thankfully.
At the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, Tyler Acoustics had a blind setup where they were asking people to distinguish between two different amplifiers. I tried it on the second day, and was able to tell the two apart very easily. However, apparently I was only the fifth person of all that had taken the test who was able to do that reliably. That shocked me completely, but if a large majority of people (presumably audiophiles at that locale) couldn't reliably tell the difference between those amps, which was night and day to me in a blind setup, I can at least understand why burn-in is controversial (and it has nothing to do with placebo effects). -- hirsch ------------------------------------------------------------------------ hirsch's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7288 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29025 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
