How much does volume matter when breaking in amps and cables?

Here is my experience: If a component does not sound good "out of the box" I do not believe any amount of break in will change my mind. However, I notice components open up a bit more after some hours of playback. Now, I'm not into the 500-800 (or whatever) hour deal, but I think things slightly improve with a few hours of playback. The rough edges (floabt) smooth out.

In my original post I was wondering if volume has an effect on break in or is turning on the component with low volume sound enough.

Correct. As I have noted many times- if its good then its good right out of the box. Everything will of course change and improve over time. But the essential character heard from zero will always be there. If not, if you don't like it right away, don't waste your time.

There really is no debate about break-in. There are only people who have never bothered to either develop the listening skills to hear it, or even taken the time to try. (You can for that matter replace "break-in" with power cord, interconnect, any number of things, and then write the exact same sentence.) The debate is settled as far as "does it happen" and only "can you hear it" remains.

The biggest challenge for most is just learning to listen and hear it. For those who wonder, here's what happens: the first few minutes running the essential character is there but grainy and harsh and lacking fine harmonic structure, subtle nuance or detail. Within minutes this etched skeletal quality begins transforming becoming much more smooth and filled out and liquid. Dynamic shadings nowhere to be found in the beginning become plainly evident later on. Eventually if the component is good enough it gets to palpable presence, that eerie feeling where there are so many subtle details coming through so effortlessly its like you are feeling it more than just hearing it.

For people like zarathu who find this impossible, well isn't it odd that I am able to explain so clearly and in such detail what you think I am not even able to hear? The simplest explanation is I know what I'm talking about, however hard that may be to believe.

But hey, another thing I'm constantly saying: DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT! Go hear for yourself.

Take whatever fuse you have that is easily replaced and swap out it out for one that is brand new. The brand new fuse will have zero hours on it. First make sure everything in your whole system is on and thoroughly warmed up. The same crappy sound you are going to hear from the new fuse is the same crappy sound you are going to hear from cold anything. So warm it up. Sit back and listen. Then swap the fuse and listen again.

Then when you get to where you can easily hear such things, repeatedly and reliably, then you will be in a position to say that no, the volume level does not matter. What matters more than anything else is time. The vast majority of burn-in improvement occurs in the first few minutes to hours. Beyond that many components continue to improve some of them yes for a hundred hours or more. But the vast majority occurs right away, and so fast you will if you are a good listener be able to hear it on the fly as it happens. 

Then once you get past the first few dozen hours or so, somewhere in there, the warm-up factor starts to come into play. You can think of this as whenever anything is turned off more than a short time, overnight say, it is almost as if it goes back to being like new again. That is to say, when you first turn it on it is not going to sound very good. But then within a fairly short time, could be 10 minutes, could be an hour, its going to stabilize and sound great again. Instead of burned-in we say warmed-up but it is the same only different, as they say.


 

It looks like I have to be the one to say it. Nothing sounds good out of the box. That’s why when you go to the audio shows the first day everything sounds dreadful. Really bad. That’s because everything is brand new out of the box. Hel-loo! If I can be so bold most every system I done hear’d sounds pretty bad and generic to me, some worse than others. Could it be they never broke in completely? Who knows?

Fabulous question! 

I have been in the Consumer Electronics Industry since 1992 and have owned a high end retail store, worked as a rep, and now for a wonderful Amplifier and Speaker Manufacturer.  Having dealt with engineers and industry insiders directly for that amount of time, I feel I more than qualified to be an authority in answering this.

Just like a car, without question, there is a "Break-in" period on everything and if you are a denier of cars actually having a "breaking-in" period, then there is probably no way to have a rational conversation about any of this...

Different things have different break-in periods and no two things are alike.  However, just like with cars, you reach a point where you get what you get in relation to gas mileage and how the car reacts and works.  Electronics, Speakers, Cables, all of it, have that point. 

So the quick answer to the question is; how much volume you put through the system does NOT matter at all!  What matters is putting a signal through everything and simply playing it with no need to overthink this here.  If you can hear sound coming from your speakers, everything is breaking in. 

With electronics, particularly DAC's and Preamps, each input has it's own break-in time and you need to have a signal running through all of it.  The only time you need to physically hear something from the speakers is if you're breaking in speakers and amps.  Or, you can put a resistor on the output of the amps to break those in if needed, but you have to have a signal going in and physically going out for full "break-in".    

These are all good things to know when visiting dealers, because in today's world, where foot traffic isn't what it used to be, there is a lot of equipment on dealer's showroom floors that may have been setting there for a year and still haven't been played enough to where the equipment is fully broken in. 

So, what's the magic number for length of time?  Like I said, everything in the chain is different, but I know with our products that number is 300 hours.  That's twelve and half days of solid play 24/7 because we can physically hear it and as a team, we have all collectively come to that consensus.   I can walk into one of our dealers and play our equipment and know right away the moment I play something when that the equipment has not had a significant amount of time on it.  That just comes from experience of doing this ALL THE TIME! 

Other manufacturers may require more or less time and people who work for those companies or sell those products should know what that amount is.  In the case with Audio Research, some of their amps, they are actually recommending 600 hours of break-in.  Who cares what the amount of time is, just play the stuff and I guarantee you'll hear it change. 

The last thing is, some products are good out of the box and can actually get worse as you play them, only to come out of the hole and get better after a certain period of time.  We have amps that do that and I will also point to older 300 Series amps from Mark Levinson (No.331, 332, 333, 33H's, and 33's) were all like that back in the day when they were new.  They were pretty decent out of the box and got so bad at about 100-150 hours that we thought they were broke, and then they climbed out of the cellar and got great. 

So in conclusion, I hope this answers and clears up most of this for some or all of you?  I realize that there will always be skeptics out there, but until you work in this industry and are around equipment as much as we are, along with getting insight from the people who are involved in building it, you'll just continue to believe what you want - and that's ok!  I've said what I believe to be true and have no problem sleeping at night over what I've shared here. 

Thank you all for your time in reading this.
Chris 

In response to geoffkait's reply above; Some manufacturers, like me, actually do send "broken-in" product to our shows.  Sometimes if you hear something that isn't good at the beginning of the show and doesn't get better, then that's just a result of poor setup and not spending enough time evaluating the room.  

However, there are caveats to that as well;  Sometimes as a manufacturer, when you're trying to fill as many seats as you can, in the room you could afford to be in, you might sacrifice the better sounding wall in order to get more people in your room.  It's a trade off we all have to decide on as we're setting up, particularly in smaller rooms where we don't have much space.  We have to make the choice, do we sacrifice sound at the expense of making it more comfortable for the attendees, or do we go for the better sound and have people complain that they couldn't get a good seat or get into the room to really audition the system or people were always walking in front of them? 

Also, we can end up short on cables or there wasn't an outlet where we were told or thought it would be and can end up arranging everything based on those limitations.  We have to take a lot into consideration at shows like Rocky Mountain Audio Fest...just FYI...

Absolutely none at all. Zarathu is right. There may be some speakers that loosen up in the bass after a few hours but that is about it. This myth got started by dealers telling their customer who were not sure that they liked a new piece of equipment, "you just have to let it break in." In a few weeks they get used to the sound and everyone is happy but in reality nothing changed. This break-in myth is the ultimate BS of all BS. The manufacturers do not want to say anything against it because the they do not want to alienate potential customers plus they can always use the break-in excuse. In reality it is not your equipment breaking in, it is your brain breaking in.