Right on, Jim.
Those are the exact time frames ive been observing. 30-50 hrs to get pretty close to the final character, and then after around 400 to acheive the full glory of their disappearing act/ profundity of their bass (which is the precise "WTF" behind why they are called "Orcas").
They can go through some pretty funny phases sonically until the ~40 hr mark. They can swing between sounding a bit muffled to boomy to bright and then back again before they settle down and start to really warm up at 40 hrs. We put anywhere between just a few all the way up to tens of hours on them in the shop before they get packed. So depending upon where they were by the time we ship them (and how many extremes of weather/altitude systems they travelled through otw to you), you can bet that they -will- have some settling in to do once you've hooked them up to voltage.
One more note is that they do need a good thrashing some time after 50 hrs to get fully loosened up in the bass register as well. Those little 3"ers have a surprising excursion before they bottom out (at which point, you should back off slightly from the volume knob out of courtesey to the cone. A little bit of (calculated) bottoming out here and there won't destroy the cones.
I've been really happy these last several months especially with the Orca Pod floorstanders going out with the new Y cables and 250 watt sub amps. I'm hoping to film a little instructional video here soon about how to get this system properly set up and dialed in, as they are a really versatile compact high end speakers thats sounds way bigger and more coherent than they have any right to. This initiative will have to wait though until i'm not distracted by all the finishing touches to the systems we've got shipping out this week.
Cant wait to start playing with the line array Orca pod in the prototyping lab here soon though...
Jim, indeed we too have been surprised (and encouraged) greatly by the wide appeal of the mighty Orcas. We've got people from age 7-90, on all 7 continents, male and female, people who are permanently wheel chair bound and professional cyclists who race against Lance Armstrong, cancer patients and survivors, the blind and the nearly deaf, of all walks of life - janitors and CEOs, serious audiophiles, heavy metal bassists, hipsters and rednecks and hippies and creationists and scientists and - wheew! You name it.
Jim - one more thing i just noticed is that you managed to walk your way through our new online checkout system for the old Sex base we had listed in our b-stock page which is encouraging to me about our website's accessibility - always open to suggestions on that front because we've started trying to encourage folks with disabilities (and military) with a 10% discount, which should hopefully take the edge off for the folks who really need to heal themselves with music.
Thinking about the future, I cant wait to see who I get to meet over the next several hundred pair, but I'm sure that none of them will be quite as awesome, supportive, friendly, patient, and good-advice-giving as our community of To-The-Core Bottlehead builders who've been a major aspect of our clientelle this past year especially.
Peace,
Clark
P.s. I did hear a first watt F5 recently through the Orcas and i brought by my Stereomour for comparison. The F5 sounded fantastic - some of the best balanced out solid state ive heard through the Orcas and ive definitely heard my fair share. The Stereomour had the edge (for everyone in the room) on that ever elusive aspect called "musicality," yet the F5 had as you'd expect, some of the "physical" benefits of solid state in that it did get louder and cleaner, but it was necessary to get to such loud levels to get to that benefit and i myself am just not that kind of listener anymore, though i do respect the needs of those who prefer such a sound via the way I've engineered the Orcas to have an ability to "chameleon" their way around the sound of a variety of amps and usually have something mildly optimistic" to say about the music itself at the very least. Like the way my own mind works i guess (?) I don't think I could ever be a proper audio reviewer
