Burn in vs perception

My opinion is that burn-in is greatly exaggerated in audio.  Tubes clearly burn in--they are red hot glowing metal.  

Wires do not change much if at al.

Here is an unrelated fact.  Suggesting the need for hundreds of hours of burn-in has avoided many, many returns.  By the time 300 hours of listening time is up, the listener has gotten used to it.

jerry

I believe capacitors can require burn in time. A recent example is the PS Audio M700 and M1200 amps. Paul at PSA did one of his videos on a question regarding break in on electronics and one of them according to him sounds terrible off the assembly line. They give it a minimum of 48 hours burn in time to prevent large numbers of returns due to it’s initial sound. The other amp does not. (Can’t recall which was which). He put it down to probably the caps which really is the only thing that makes sense to me, though he admitted he wasn’t 100% sure of that. Prior to that I was pretty sure SS did NOT require break in time, but he convinced me otherwise. I never doubted mechanical items do, speakers and carts being the primary examples.

There’s some great perspective from very experienced members which I echo. I personally believe a lot of the ’burn-in’ comments from manufacturers are a way to temper buyers and bridge the time period while the listener themselves adjusts to the sound characteristics of whatever component it might be.

I too am in the camp that many solid state components take time to sound their best, specifically warming up from cold and stabilizing. Speakers are the main items I've audibly heard break-in and sound changes.

I don't want to make a lot out of burn-in, but I'll tell you my story.  When I started getting into speaker mods I upgraded the tweeter and midrange caps in a pair of Focal speakers.  For about 2 days I was having weird surround effects.  Sounds would appear to come from under and to the right of my chair.

They stopped with nothing in my room changing at all.

Based on that, I feel there was definitely something going on related to head related transfer function math.  That is, there was some odd comb filtering going on that caused me to perceive the sounds in the wrong place which eventually went away.

It also tells me that if we are measuring for these effects, the standard cap measurements in the basic AC tutorial won't be adequate.

Oh, almost forgot.  This one has happened to me and a few other poeple.  Using ICEpower amplifiers (Class D) I came back after being gone for a weekend.  I had turned off the rack (fear of surges).  When I first got back I could not understand why my system sounded so bad.

I finally realized, 2 days later, it was that I had turned the amps off.  For some reason those Class D amps, and maybe others, really don't sound very good until you leave them on for 2 days.  They don't have to play anything, you don't have to listen to break in your ears. Just leave them on and they will sound better.

My Luxman however has no such issues.