I read extensively about the DSD Sr. burn in period and now have some first-hand experience. Loving the DSD Sr. Today I installed the Bridge II and at very first blush it sounds a touch more brittle and clinical than the USB direct out of my Mac Air Laptop. Does Bridge II tend to burn in and ‘soften up’?
The bridge probably does need to burn in, but it runs hotter so at least a part of the burn will be a more normal length (say, 50-100 hours with signal.) The path thru the FPGA from the bridge input to the shared buffering and signal processing will take longer, but I doubt anyone could hear that change in a blind test. Brittle can be a sign of RFI infiltration, you might try moving your network cable away from the usual suspects. Also when I had my NAS 6’ away from my (open) DS the sound was much worse than having it in the next room.
Thanks, Ted. I bought my DSD used with low hours so I suspect there may be some burn-in interplay with the DSD itself and the bridge II.
It is part of the fun, but the deeper I go down the hifi hole the more variables I find which makes it tough to isolate things, ie., is it the cable, the dac, the placement, the power supply, the preamp, the burn-in etc. 