Right. What I thought. Everything so messed up you couldn't hear even if you knew what to listen for. But the good news, you are listening! I'm harsh but fair. For what you have noticed, good. Keep listening.
Okay so now here's the thing. The inches you find so amazing, in terms of where you want to be, might as well be miles. Inches are fine in terms of adjusting what you're hearing so far, gross frequency response. Reason I say gross, its gross. So gross you can hear it easily with any stereo. You can hear it with your laptop. Play anything with the laptop sitting on a table. Now lift it up. Hear the difference? That's bass reinforcement from the wide flat table top. Same exact thing happening with your speakers relative to the floor and walls.
The changes that happen with burn-in are much less obvious yet still easily heard. It helps a lot to know what to listen for. And to have speakers accurately placed not just plopped down like they are now.
Because where you want to be is measured in millimeters, and I mean only one or two, or fractions of an inch, and I mean like 1/8.
Get a tape measure and square. Tweak the speakers to be the same distance from your sweet spot and angled in so they are exactly symmetrical. You find inches amazing, wait till you hear the difference a few degrees of toe in has on imaging when your speakers are precisely aligned like this!
Now what to listen for in terms of burn-in. Warm-up. Whatever. Same thing. Different only in terms of time frame. Let me explain.
Take anything cold, new or used, wire or component, does not matter. Start using it cold, when it hasn't been used in a while, it will not sound anywhere near as good at first as it will later on. The difference between brand new and used but not recently is the same in terms of character but different mainly in terms of how big the difference and how long the time to get to stable and good. A system or component used all the time but not since last night will probably be back to great in an hour or so. A system or component brand new will probably be more like a couple hundred hours or so.
Got it? This is not one and done. This is always and ongoing.
Now sorry for blowing you off earlier but you know there's a lot of goofballs and trolls around here, the place is full of them, and you could easily have been just one more. Only saying you have been moving things around and listening changed my mind. So here's what to listen for and how to learn to hear it.
The hard part about this is you're trying to hear something that develops very gradually over a long period of time. The one time it happens fast is right at the very beginning. When you know what you're doing you'll be able to hear changes happening in real time as the minutes go by. Later on its more like you will notice one day it sounds a whole lot better than it did last week. This happened to me just last night. "New" as in recently modded Active Shielding MPC. Only thing new in them is the diodes and caps ala Michael Spallone. Everything in my system thoroughly burned in. Only 9 diodes and two caps were new. Monster changes as those few parts burned in!
The sound initially, and yes I'm still talking about this but its the same for everything, it has the overall character but its like a sketch or drawing yet to be painted. The sound has a grain to it. Leading edges exaggerated, harmonic development sketchy. Instruments are localized as in there is width and depth, but this also is kind of sketchy as if not quite really there. There is an impression of detail, but then you realize this is mostly because of the exaggerated leading transients. In fact there's a tremendous amount of detail being hidden or glossed over.
(Learn to recognize this, its the main thing responsible for "hi-fi" sound and its killing a lot of audiophiles. They just don't know it.)
Then over time the sketchy sound gets filled and colored in until eventually if you got a good one its Technicolor and if you got a really good one 70mm. Last night after one week the sound was so divorced from the speakers and room I could hardly believe it. Fundamentals and harmonic development so fully realized it was easy to hear the skin on the drum, and so free of grain and glare it was like real, palpable presence, on and on.
Hearing this as it happens over such a long period of time is hard at first. Here's a trick that worked for me. Leave everything on all the time. Just leave it on. Everything. No matter what. Do this for at least a week. Probably you will notice nothing. Perfectly normal. Changes happen slow and you're not yet a very experienced listener. Just do it.
Then after at least a full week of this plan some time when you can do the following. Have a really good late night listening session. Play your favorite best recording last. Turn everything off and go to bed.
Next day turn everything on and immediately play that same recording.
Yeah. And keep in mind that was just overnight. What your system sounded like brand new was much worse. The degree to which you hear a difference doing this is the degree to which you have developed as a skilled listener. Which if you are, it will sound like crap. So crappy you will never ever want to do that again!
Let me know.
