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Old 05-07-2021, 12:59 PM
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Originally Posted by Soundmig View Post
Very interesting .... looking forward to additional measurements / impressions once you hit the 400 hour mark! Hard to believe that "break in" takes THAT long, but ... stranger things have happened. If they even come close to the 30.1's at that price - that will be amazing! Many, many enthusiasts for audio simply can't afford Harbeth's, Dynaudio's, JA's, Revel's, etc. So, your measurements, educated ear and overall impressions will be informative. Might also be interesting (as an adjunct) to see if there is a low cost speaker cable that mates up reasonably well with the GR's. AQ Type 4, Cardas Crosslink, Kimber VS series, entry level WireWorld, Blue Jeans ???, etc. For the person out there scraping together $800+ for some decent speaker, they may not have $$$ left for more esoteric speaker cable? Just an idea :-)
Hi Soundmig,
Thanks for your post. 400 hours is not at all unheard of for speaker (or capacitor) burn-in, older Dyns, e.g. my Contour S3.1 and the legacy Confidence line took a minimum of 300 hours and new Dyns can take 400 hours or more. The Teflon caps in my CJ CT-5 pre took...1500 hours and about 2 1/2 years of use. So, none of this is uncommon when premium parts are used.

I think the measurements show they already come very close to the Beths and the Dyns, and presently, actually measure smoother in the critical midrange. I know for a fact that the X-LS Encores have as good or better parts in them as the Harbeths or Dyns, as I built the crossover, and there are no sandcast resistors, iron-core inductors or electrolytic caps in the crossover.



As for high-quality affordable speaker cables, I'd go with Danny's DIY speaker cables at GR-Research, too, only $13.75/foot.

He has a video about them here: https://youtu.be/DfjQJxeTANE

I'll try to measure the R Channel Harbeth today so we can compare to the X-LS Encore.
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