Break in time that extends to months or maybe even years!!

heaudio123 stepping in it big time:

Does anyone have the current price per acre on swamp land in Florida in this current pandemic?

Why? Are you a real estate agent? Because you sure don’t seem to be an audiophile. CES stands for Consumer Electronics Show. Stan Ricker is an audiophile legend. The place was packed. With industry insiders. The guy I roomed with, he had more parts and equipment than you could stuff in a large fishing tackle box. That’s just one guy. One random guy. This was an audience full of just that same sort of "random guy". Hell yes they had the part, and the solder, and replaced it.

Chris Brady was there, standing right next to me. https://teresaudio.com

You can apologize any time now.

These are the kinds of things people think up when they have yet to develop any real listening skills. Its like in the beginning its real common to use one special recording and play it over and over again. To sit in the same spot, obsess over matched volume levels, on and on piling one ritual on another, one check and balance and qualification (reliably? double-blind? are you sure? really really sure? really really REALLY sure???) on top of another, with no end in sight.

This is all goes away once you learn what’s what. Then all of a sudden it hits you how mind-numbingly soul sappingly boring it is to play the same little bit over and over again. Or even the same track. Or even to pause the track. All these crazy ideas of having to do it fast and everything be just a certain way it all goes POOF! When you learn to listen.

Best example I know, one time at CES they had this crap PA system and it had some problem and it was outdoors and packed and from where I was way in the back it sounded like just your typical crap PA system. But to the guys up closer and towards the middle, they were complaining. And so people are running around back and forth trying to figure out what it is. And then someone in the middle yells out check the something or other. I couldn’t hear. Like I said, way in the back. But even from way back there it was clear something happened. Now instead of running around one guy is looking at one specific thing and then a few minutes later its fixed and the show goes on.

Word travels fast. Within minutes the word reaches even to me way in the back. The guy was Stan Ricker. He said there’s a bad resistor in the crossover. Or cap. Something like that. Been a long time. Anyway, point is, this guy listening for the first time to an absolute piece of crap system, outdoors, and with mega-distractions, was able to diagnose an electrical fault right down to the discrete part involved BY EAR!

And he didn’t need no double-blind A/B or any of that.

Listening skills. Get some.

The sound early on tends to be a bit grainy and etched. This has the effect of making it seem a bit more detailed and exciting. 

Well first off if the gear cannot be enjoyed right out of the box then sorry but you bought the wrong gear. 

That said, everything improves with time. But its not like break-in is all that's going on. 

There is also warm-up. Some things warm up fast, others can take hours. Solid state gear is famous for needing to be left on 24/7 in order to sound its best. 

Then there is magnetization and static charges. Playing music, the rapidly alternating signal gradually and over time can magnetize regions within wires and components. Static electricity can also build up. As a result transients become smeared and grainy and the noise level increases. This happens gradually and most never do anything about it. Most don't even know about it. I do, and address it every session. 

The last big one is power. Sound quality improves along with power quality late into the night. 

So any given night you have the sound improving from this complex mix of warm-up and charges and power. Add break-in to that if the component is new.