Your thoughts about an upgrade

tomic601: I’m bi-wired now with the 8TC and Treo CTs. The new ones, like the old ones, will be cherry, because I love it and it goes well in the room. I'm looking forward to expert advice on speaker placement and tuning all the EQ on the Quatros.

It’d to get together when the plague is over; I’m in La Jolla.

I have Vandersteen 5A's with Ayre electronics  .....and a terrible room.   Richard himself did the setup.  Not until I got rid of furniture was I able to lock the sound into place.   The room is very much a part of the sound and it should be addressed appropritately. (the wood on my 5A's are Kowazinga....don't know what that is, but they are gorgeous.)

So I took the plunge and got the Quatro CTs in cherry, M5-HPA amps, a Rogue Audio RP-9 pre-amp and Audioquest balanced interconnects for everything but the Rogue Audio Aries phono preamp and Rega RP-3 turntable, which are unchanged. The exaSound e32 DAC and Sigma streamer are also unchanged except for a new Audioquest "Earth" interconnect which replaces a Kimber Hero. The Kimber 8TC speaker cables I was using are cut down to 5' and still bi-wired.

It took about six weeks for all the pieces to arrive and everything was installed yesterday. There was a scary-but-then-hilarious moment after the guys from Stereo Unlimited (San Diego) had everything hooked up. We turned it on and got nothing, not from the phono, not from DAC. At long last we turned up the volume and learned that the Rogue RP-9 volume dial goes well above 100, and a setting of 75 is inaudible, at least in this system.

I'll post some pictures on my system page but can say that the Rogue Audio pieces and Vandersteen amps are low-glitz black boxes. That kind of suits my tastes visually, which of course has no effect on the sound but is the stuff you sit and look at while you listen to music. The Quatros look almost identical to the Treos they replaced, which was what I wanted.

The installers set the speakers at the vertices of an equilateral triangle with my listening position, and slight toe-in. Of course I'm already noticing substantially more bass. The drill is that they will come back in a few weeks and tune the equalizers on the Quatros after everything is broken in.

Which brings me to my question:  how long is a reasonable break-in period for this setup—40 hours, 50 hours, 100 hours? I really don't know, and would appreciate any theories/suppositions/hypotheses that anybody cares to offer.

@OP,
Congrats on a great system/choice!

Break in is one of those things that varies, at least to me. Some things require a couple hundred hours to settle in, others more.
As for the Vandy's, I would suspect at least 200 hours. More would be better, in my opinion. You have both speakers and amps breaking in, so that is a lot of things that will be 'settling in'.
My only recommendation would be to switch to some AQ speaker cables.
Kimbers are good, but the new AQ cables really, really are very good.
As I have posted on other threads, I am not a cable guy. But, when I heard the Willaim Tell cables, I was blown away.
Alas, more money, but, I think you will be very happy with the results.
Perhaps Stereo Unlimited can loan you a set?
Bob