That’s really what draws me to dCS. I know that I will receive great support if I should need it and receive periodic updates throughout the product life cycle. I know that the Bartok should also retain a decent resale value given the long life cycle and updates. I don’t know if the same can be said for more boutique brands that don’t have the same history of dCS.
As for the home demo, I actually tend to listen more to my 2-channel setup than to my headphones. My plan would be to drive my power amp direct from the Bartok. I’m sure it would be a good fit, but at these prices, I’d like to make sure before pulling the trigger, especially considering the fact that there are other options available for much less than the Bartok. Ideally, I’d be able to do a side-by-side comparison of the options, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Gotcha. That makes perfect sense. Good luck with your effort. My Vivaldi DAC/Upsampler get here tomorrow. My dealer was originally going to drive them out personally [I am about 75 miles away from the shop], but additional travel restrictions in the Bay Area forced them to surrender the boxes to UPS. I come off quarantine tomorrow night. Gonna be like Christmas.
And how many recommended hours for Bartok break in? I just noticed a huge difference now at the 35-40 hour mark.
Of course I am well used to this. Naim is notorious for break in - and a further requirement is being constantly powered on 24/7. A well broken in Naim component could be several years old however if powered down for 24 hours it will then require 2-3 days to come back on song.
Chord Cable Co. Sarum cable - 300-400 hours break in - I kid you not.
My full Naim 500 system is in for its 15 year recap service and will also have the DR upgrades completed. When it comes back I will be looking at 2-3 months for full break in.
Glad I now have my new Bartok headphone system to keep me occupied
tbh I didn’t know there was a dedicated burn-in mode! I’ve just been using my Bartok as normal since arriving in December. I must have done several hundred hours of paying now. Do I still need to do the burn-in?
I doubt it. Some may feel otherwise but there are some well known equipment designers who feel that using music is a preferable way of achieving the objective.
I have used some system conditioning devices and CDs which could be regarded as a rough equivalent to burn in equipment and which,IMO, degraded the sound subsequently taking some days of playing normal music to regain its former excellence. I am not alone in this type of finding.
One negative aspect of using pink noise as a burn in method is that you cannot actually hear if any changes are occurring or when they occur. 40 hours of pink noise later you will have no real memory of what it sounded like to begin with as you won’t have a reference
Personally I always use music . Then I can hear when the orchestral strings on a specific recording lose, say, a glassy edge or a voice excess sibilance.
NB: I rarely find the burn in of hardware or cables to be an incremental process. Improvements, or even occasional temporary reverses, seem more to have the nature of step changes (see glevans 35-40 hour point above).
Maybe not quite burn in, but playing track 1 or 7 (longer version) of this…
…before any serious listening session is essential for me. I’ve been using this for over 10 years. As the system has got better, the difference it makes has got bigger.
Please don’t ask me for an explanation of how it works! I’m a Chartered Engineer and I can only guess which is not good!
Agreed with comments above. I use the pink noise in the evening when I go to bed. I set it to run at about midnight and then it goes for 12 hours. During the afternoon and evening it is mostly music. Music is the best however a bit difficult to keep running through the wee wee hours
I have a playlist of about 50 songs which I created for demo purposes. I have been using it for years. It is a varying combination of different genres - all songs which I know extremely well and allow me to tell how things are progressing. Last night’s music sounded quite good with a noticable improvement. Tonight I think I should be somewhere near or close to 50 hours so depending on how long the BARTOK needs (still have not found any comments from dCS) I am going to use the 50-100 hour number and then consider the process complete.
Solwisesteve - several hundred hours of music since December - you are done!
@PAR , Pete, yes I am. About 12 hours now and loving my more expansive confinement. Nice dinner and champagne with the Love of My Life and finally in my own bed. Been gone over a month, what with the trip to Tanzania and then quarantine. My Vivaldi boxes are in the garage going through their own 24 hour isolation before being disinfected, unboxed, and then the actual components disinfected before being brought into the house.
Great that you are at least able to stay confined like the rest of us ( I am in the UK where it is pretty much total lockdown).
I know that you want to be careful but there is little need to disinfect either the external packing or the Vivaldi components themselves given your circumstances.
Viable coronavirus can only exist for 24 hours on cardboard and <72 hours on other surfaces. Your boxes have been in your garage for longer than that and the Vivaldi items would have been placed in the packaging in the UK some time before that.
Just so I am not accused of spreading fake news I link to an article on safety of packages and Covid-19 from one of our heavyweight newspapers, The Guardian, and you will also see that their sources are of US origin; The New England Journal of Medicine and two professors one from Yale and one from Harvard.
Exactly what Pete just said
I have 2 graduated college twins here driving things at home with all things CV19. They are EXTREMELY diligent.
If anything was on your boxes or gear it is definitely dead by now
I appreciate all that information, and am quite familiar with it. Although trained as a lawyer, one of my subspecialties in my years of practice was dealing with infectious disease in the workplace. I don’t approach these topics from an alarmist or uninformed point of view. I’ve been following coronavirus from the very start last year, partly because I have relatives in Wuhan.
I agree that 24/72 is what the reliable data show so far. But the data are not a guarantee. And given the un-reliability and change-ability (remember the repeated flip-flopping about masks and respirators) of much of what we know about coronavirus—and most of our knowledge is less than four months old—you’ll forgive me (I hope) for interpreting these data as “viability has not yet been proven to be more than 24 hours on porous surfaces such as cardboard or 72 hours on non-porous surfaces.” The problem with that statement is that it also means this: “Viability beyond 24/72 has not be conclusively disproven.” IOW, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There are three other factors not accounted for:
You may have misread my message or time stamp. My boxes have been in my garage less than 24 hours. The UPS driver last touched them at about 15:30 PDT on Tuesday, Mar 31. Just a little more than 18 hours.
However long it has been since the boxes left dCS—and I am not actually worried about dCS—you don’t take into account that the packages were handled by people at the local store and by who knows how many people at UPS. And both the cardboard boxes are also covered in several hard plastic bill of lading envelopes. There is no way to know who touched, sneezed, or coughed on these packages in the last 72 hours. Maybe nobody, but how can I know? And why should I make an assumption in the direction of presumed safety? We treat every inbound package in our home as requiring sanitation because there is no way to conclusively know otherwise. Every package. Delivered groceries, mail, or parcels. If we start making exceptions because of what we think might be safe, it sort of destroys the entire point of having a safety regimen. And it teaches kids the wrong lesson in my view about the importance of health protocols.
Both my wife and I are immuno-compromised for different reasons: stage 4 cancer for me and near-fatal bouts with pneumonia for her. There is simply zero justification for favoring convenience over caution in our case.
At the end of the day, between inbound package disinfection and personal hygiene, I am a much better protective barrier for me and my family than any assumption that could be made about the rest of the world. This approach also comports with my values about personal responsibility and accountability. And it only costs me a few hours of waiting and minutes of cleaning.
Nice dinner and champagne with the Love of My Life and finally in my own bed. Been gone over a month, what with the trip to Tanzania and then quarantine. My Vivaldi boxes are in the garage going through their own 24 hour isolation before being disinfected, unboxed, and then the actual components disinfected before being brought into the house.