Are rig hours reversable?

Burn-in works,

to address the OP, I would venture to state - if the gear is not used for 1 year or longer, it would need to be re-burned at half of the initial hour count.
Happy Listening!

exactly swampwalker

RW- If you read the OP more carefully, you will see that Warren is asking if, after burn in has been completed, SQ deteriorates over time, if a component is left unused. Not whether SQ decreases with additional use (maybe burn-out?), which is what you seem to have answered.

Not taking any position on burn-in or burn-out ;-)

If you are reading, Nandric, that emoticon [;-)] is meant to indicate that it was said in jest.

Good question Warren.
With most of my (major) components being tube gear I have to shut it off while not in use. This is a dilemma because if I go 1-2 weeks without listening, it sounds like crap for at least several hours of warm up and playing. Sometimes if I don't listen for more than 2 weeks it could take several days of listening before it sounds its best again. If I have consecutive days of listening it's generally not a problem and only needs an hour or so to sound its best.
I can't contribute to what specifically needs so much time to "warm up" again. I do leave my power conditioner on all the time. Occasionally (here's where you're going to think I'm nuts) I'll unplug the conditioner for a day and then fire it up again. I swear it needs this every once in a while.

If there was always a positive effect on SQ going forward, then we wouldn't have such a robust 2nd hand market for used gear :P

When you don't like gear at first, and later you do, it's often attributed to burn-in. When you do like gear at first, and later you don't, it seems you were just "ready to try something different".

I'm not saying that burn-in works in reverse, it's just that I think the whole thing is way overblown when it comes to electronics. I had one tech tell me "these caps will sound better with burn-in" after he'd wired them so egregiously WRONG that the amp had a 6dB/octave low frequency rolloff starting all the way up at 1kHz!! Nope, I really don't think burn-in is gonna help much there...

For what it's worth I do believe (and have observed) that break-in can be significant with new speakers & headphones, and to a lesser extent cartridges. It may exist for electronics too, but it's far less significant in my experience.

I always find it amusing that folks claim a positive difference after burn-in. I don't think I've ever heard it said that something sounded worse after X number of hours of burn-in. Frankly, this defies common sense and really makes question the validity of the claims...

-RW-