Break in period

I am rather enjoying your astute game

Glad to here it. This hobby should be enjoyed!

These forums are consistently bombarded by fears of significant detrimental effects on the sound quality; (jitter, cables, break-in, warm-up, house electrical wiring, power cords, interconnects, speaker cables, gaps in digital waveforms, clocks, transports, etc.).

I often find myself trying to point out that many of these fears (of detrimental effects) are greatly exaggerated out of all proportion. This climate of "fear" is unhealthy, IMHO, as it distorts what is important from what is relatively insignificant, and, even worse, all these fears may intefere with what is absolutely critical: to sit back and enjoy the music!

Hi Shadorne, you are in fact absolutely right. . . there is almost a feeling of ancient magic to the hobby. . . . Some of it, perhaps like break in -- may be in part due to things our instruments have still problems measuring, as well as to the occasional minor dose of placebo effect. Other matters, like astute small clocks, aledgedly precious, semiprecious, or river-polished stones smack of neo-keltic rites and audiophilic-druidism. Next October at the AudioFest in Denver I should organize a grand sacrificial cerimony to propitiate onto us Audiana--sister of Gaya and great goddess of sound. Does anyone have a virgin piece of audio electronic whose yet unfulfilled life they would like to render into a burnt offering for the benefit of all of us? The cerimony would be very powerful and moving. . . lots of brilliant pebbles, Quantum dots, Clever Clocks of all makes and sizes, hypertweeters. . . . . . assurances of links to the mother of all web effects. . . the sacrificial Lamm all decked in audio finery and tied with audiophile-grade hempen twine to a brass audio isolation rack donated by Virtual Dynamics which keeps resonating like a tuning fork. . . and after we eliminate all stray Doppler effects, and we optimize the cloning of all its quantum states. . . replaced all its fuses with slugs of the best copper-Beryllium alloy, plugged its power chord into a 220V outlet, we will chant a final invocation and will throw its power switch. . . for an instant of firy and ecstatic break-in!

It is the transformers that require a long time to break in.
If you run a source and preamp to an amp that is turned off your neighbors will be happy and the preamp breaks in.

pipedream

Shadorne, are you saying that engineers deliberately engineer their equipment to audibly burn-in? I have heard some far out theories before, but this one sets new standards.

+++ Often the part selection and design criteria are heavily influenced by the desired products useful life span. +++

Mmm yeah. This statement would have been even more interesting if there was any correlation between burn-in and reliability/life-span. There isn’t, but if you are theorizing that there is, then we have yet again set new standards for far out theories.

+++ Nobody wants a "lemon" out there that hundreds of customers complain about; the cost to make a manufacturing recall to get equipment to perform properly as originally specified to customers; the cost to reputation +++

Well it’s nice to see you’ve done Business Management 101, but again this has zero relevance to the phenomenon of burn in.

I guess you may find individuals that will send back V-Caps because they sound slightly better after 400 hours. Personally I elected to keep mine ... each time.

Regards
Paul

Paul,

My point was that audio engineers design things to sound consistent and significant audible changes ascribed to lengthy burn-ins (after months of listening) is not very desirable.

If I understand you and others, you are saying that this has nothing to do with choice of material or circuit design but is the intrinsic property of most wire and most of the electrical components typically used; a lengthy break-in, lasting several months, being unavoidable and independent of the design or material choices.

I can't see how to reconcile these views - so I propose we agree to disagree. As I am blessed with tin ears, I am blissfully unaware of these minute changes and simply can't imagine how frustrating it must be to be able to hear them. I tend to think of Edgar Allan Poe Usher family type thing ;-) Admittedly this last remark being a bit of hyperbole - for amusement - no offense intended.