Martin. I am the only one on the tour who went through the burnin of the Silvers, and I posted extensively on this earlier in the thread, though others have heard the broken in ones, and their comments might help. But then everything matters in a system/room, and all are different, so all of our experiences will likely be different.
I am wondering if you can get on the tour list and hear the ones going around. Comparing those to yours would tell the tale.
Here is a personal take on audio/psychology. Especially since everything I test involves the question of spending money to refine an already very refined system, I really do not understand why folks would want to talk themselves into buying something that is not an audio improvement comparable to the cost.
I can only speak from my own experience, but having tested soooooo many audio things, by appearances, I come at it with a relatively open mind. And as my system/room has improved, by additions that have passed the improvement versus value test, I hear more! This is progressive here, and the more fine information comes out from reducing impediments, the more nuance comes out, revealing more.
Either that or I am deluded enough that I continue to support the same story I originally fabricated every time I listen. And I do recheck/adjust things every so often as I tune the system. Also, if they are illusions, I am able to make my wife believe them too, and by psychic connection. I am always very careful not to tell her exactly what I have done or what I hear from it. Often I won't even tell her anything has changed, waiting to see if she will respond. Almost inevitably she will ask me what I did with accurate comments about what she hears. In the end, she always hears comparably to what I hear, and often with cursory listening from other rooms adjacent to the listening room.
But I have been working many years on tuning this system to sound as authentic to natural playing in good rooms as possible. And to me, this requires fine-tuning everything. Finally a big listening tool has been micro detail and micro dynamics...some of the things hardest to get well. And if I do get them better, it is much more likely that everything else is capable of sounding good too, except of course if any of the countless ways we can mask sound are at play.
Within this complex, if one person can't hear something in their system/room, the assumption that others can't in theirs lacks logic to me. On the other hand, the fact that a single part in the signal chain masking aspects of the sound will render whatever it was unable to be heard by anyone...this is not theoretical. And since even minor weak links tend to be many, and progressive....the thought that folks who have solved most of these issues are deluding themselves...well, my experience does not support this.
The vast variability of systems, rooms and system synergy, being comprised of so many different components (and parts), wires, tubes, sources, power quality; adjustments made by room issues with cancellation and amplification of frequencies, and other timing reflection issues....on and on, it is clearly no mean task to develop a system to be super revealing as well as musical. A single tube, cap, resistor, cable.... can sound decent while holding a whole system back, compounded by collective effects.
At the same time, creative designer/builders have been trying to solve this for decades and yet there are still as many ways to mask sound as there are parts. And if all are not up to the others, it is very difficult to get a truly revealing system/room. If the sound is masked, even lightly, those sounds will never be heard.
Here, even with my system/room being fairly accurate and revealing for some years now, my experience is that it can get better....and the more I solve issues, the more I hear.
At the same time, from years of fine tuning with very revealing parts (many I had to make or modify to get what I wanted without ridiculous costs), some additions have become less important than they were when I bought them. This is not because they didn't help, but because everything else related had gotten better making the original thing less important in the more refined system. Particularly clear with room and power and vibration here....how and what we use to filter/regenerate power, receptacles, power cables, cable ends....how mitigating vibration refines all aspects of fine information...for fine detail and definition, it all really matters in my house and my power was relatively quiet to begin with, and the room great in many ways, and not in others to begin with. But then as I think of it, my ICs and speaker cables are equally as powerful in their abilities to pull refined sound and notably better than previous ones...everything really matters here.
All that said, the Silver Pills made a notable difference in the sound here, enough that I had to work to get the most from them while continuing the ongoing thread of what I find musical. And this is not so easy with my system so revealing and heavily refined to tastes, the latitudes of "great" narrowed by countless hours of refinement. Long story short though, who knows, that the Silver Pills were pretty notable here does not necessarily mean they will be everywhere.
My take anyway