Tannoy anyone? Cheviot Legacy vs. Stirling GR

I zero interest in China hifi product. Those UK Whig guy tax themselves belly to chin and charge through the sole of feet so not crazy about deal with those guy either but no China fi 

Omystarsandgarters. So much for the understanding of those who believed they were "in the know". I wonder when that is supposed to have started. And, sort of, if the splitting of the lines for production holds any water - or consequence, really. Maybe the supposed Polish factory would also be problematic. Sigh. Such a bummer...

As a follow up, after 100 hours or so the Stirlings have calmed down quite a bit. Still tough for moderately long listening and I'm pointing my finger at my source....although the same defect is true with both my digital and vinyl. Finding time to play at moderately loud volumes is a little hard around here, so break in is slower than I'd like, but Acoustic Zen Hologram II biwire helped (they are breaking in as well). I've been able to move the treble energy to -1.5, so that's moving in the right direction anyway. They are more musically involving (for me) than my Devore which seemed to check off a lot of boxes and were much better in many ways, but left me at a distance. An audio friend described them as "fauve" and I think that fits.

I'm going to stick with this for now and am considering a full reconstruction back to SS and inefficient speakers - like Gamut or Plinius power and Supratek Pre driving Dynaudio Confidence 3 or 5. That's my most familiar ground and sticks in my memory as a sonic delight.

@budburma

I’d definitely have them checked over by a tech before giving up on them (check internal wiring and each driver for continuity and DC resistance, etc). They’re too nice and expensive to not sound wonderful after 100 hours, or really even from hour #1. I still suspect this is much more likely to be internal issue and has nothing to do with supposed burn-in requirements.

Sorry you’re having such a bad experience so far :(

My experience, going through a lot of audio gear: Companies make production mistakes all the time. Sellers of used gear sometimes either "miss" things wrong with it, or try to pass the buck. And stuff happens in shipping! I think the "burn in" panacea is bandied about a lot of times when the gear really needs to be checked out for operational health. Your brain can adapt to a skewed sonic balance over time, but only so much!! I once had a tube headphone amp fixed by a guy who erroneously put small bypass caps IN SERIES with the big output caps. It sounded like sh**t and his brilliant response was "those big caps take a LONG time to burn in!". At that point I opened it up, and even with only the most minimal circuit knowledge, this doofus’s mistake was clear as day. The classic roll-off formula indicated that with the values involved, the bypass cap was acting like a high pass filter starting at 1kHz! NO bass and very little midrange. Went to another tech who got that (among other things) right.

In all my history there is ONE TIME I can remember a piece of gear that sounded mediocre out of the box and then improved wildly after ~300 hours. It was a set of Audio Technica L3000 "Leatherhead" headphones. It didn’t sound broken out of the box either - just not inspiring like it eventually did. That’s the only time something has changed enough from burn-in to completely reform my opinion of it. And I DID have an older burned-in one to compare. I think they did something weird with those L3000 drivers - that model sounded way different than any other AT headphone of that time period.