LSA Voyager GAN Amplifier
yyzsantabarbara, I suggest you put in 400 hours of amp time before sending it to Ric. I am doing this with my Rouge Audio Studio N-10DM, a dual mono IceEdge 1200 AS1. Francesco of Rouge advised 400 hours. At this moment, I have 157 hours on it. I let it play with my typical music, Mozart violin concertos with small orchestra. Loudest sections are about 75 dB, although transients are higher, but probably under 85 dB for milliseconds. I live in an apartment building and let it play for 16 waking hours a day, so I don't disturb neighbors by keeping the volumes modest. Ideal break in procedures are speculative. I wonder what the relevance of harsh break in at 90-100 dB would be. Perhaps the most relevant procedure would be to use your typical music at the playback levels you would listen to. The sound is quite variable at this point. It has little to do with whether the amp is warm or cold. My power quality is very variable, which I found with other amps. At this point, I don't know whether my variability is due to the power quality or the break in of the Rouge amp. At 400 hours, I will do the final assessment, go back to my reference amps after they are briefly re-broken in after 1 month of no use. Then I will do Ric's mods. Years ago, I almost bought the Benchmark AHB2. It had excellent clarity and neutrality, although after break in it was very slightly warmer than my Bryston 2.5B SST2. So I want to hear how your AHB2 compares to the new amp. |
Unless an amp has Teflon coupling caps or such, I find 200 hours of PLAY time to be plenty of time to know what an amp sounds like. When I sold my EVS 1200 amps I included cheap 100 watt 8 ohm power resistors so someone can burn in the amp continuously. You listen for a couple of hours then take off the speaker wires and install the resistors and turn it back on at the same volume level.....then check to see how hot the resistors are......if they are nice and toasty but you can at least touch them then just leave it playing on repeat or streaming till you listen again. These are $1,51 each plus shipping for the 8 ohm 100 watters: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/152815608794?hash=item23948523da:g:mA8AAOSwdW9aCk-K They can only do about 10 watts free air (not mounted to a heatsink) but are plenty big enough. Just solder a nice big wire to each end and you can even put cheap bananas on to make them super easy to install. I usually put a new amp in the bathroom and burn it in straight using resistors for one week (160 hours) and then start modding. Same with DACs and players (I use a 1K resistor for low level components). However, the mods make way more difference than burn in. The mods will always make the same difference and most mods do not require much burn in. Even 24 hours of play is plenty of time to get an idea of the sound of something. After that, each mod makes a serious difference Many times I have taken a barely burned in piece and started mods and I could always hear the mods improvement. Having something idle is not play time. You really want play time. You want current running through all the parts. Class A amps run a lot of current through the power supply and output stages but none through the wiring and jacks and coupling caps, etc. Only play time does it all. Class D amps idle really low in current and have an inductor and caps to ground on the output......you want current running through these parts. Viber 6, 157 hours is plenty of time to know what the basic stock amp sounds like. It is not going to magically change at exactly 400 hours. I personally have never heard an IceEdge amp that had 400 hours of play time. Even my own amp never had that many play hours before I sold it (it did have hundreds of hours at idle as I never shut it off). I am not saying you need to send me your amp right now......in fact, I am busy for a couple more weeks so you have more time to burn in. Just sayin' |
I am on my second CD playing through my modded Sony SCD-1 and I am impressed. My Sony is not ideal in this room because I do not use DSP with the Sony. I won't get into details, but my ROON server is down. I am trying to move that to my MacMini. Once I have that sorted out today I will have my best source ready to go. Saying all of that this amp sounds great on with my Sony. The sound was actually awful the first couple of songs but now we are rolling. I wont get into audiophile terms (still early yet). All I will say is that my head has been bobbing, my toes have been tapping like a madman. This amp seems fast, maybe that is why I am having this great time with the music. No fatigue so far. It also seems good with my 2 Ohm speaker. I felt some things were just not there with the 2 Ohm speaker and the Benchmark AHB2. Not so with the CODA #8 and Voyager. BTW - I forgot I am getting my KRELL K-300i back from KRELL tomorrow. That integrated sounds great on the Thiel CS3.7 (smooth and great bass). It will be a shootout with 3 amps. |
