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

By inspection, since the Cable Cooker re-breaks in cables every so often, nothing ever completely breaks in or stays broken in. Make sense? 

Dream on companies can not tie up resources to break in stuff.This is high end audio if you do not like this take up photography.

@douglas_schroeder   No, that's just your gear, Doug..;0)

It's a huge selling point in some circles to buy gear that is extremely demanding.  The speaker that requires megalithic amps to sound good. The amp that needs $10K power cables to bring out the best performance.

Yes, I've heard break in, and no, I've never heard anything take more than 4 days.

No one's gear sounds any good prior to 5,000 hours.  

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. 



 

daveyf

This isn't a court of law...so your post is a little off, IMHO.

Why? Because I question the claim?

The claim that the member made was that he heard that the amp in question was still improving after 900 hours, and i am not going to call him to task for what he heard, not do I have any reason to do so, do you?

Yes. I'm not accusing anyone of dishonesty - after all, I don't even know who you are talking about - but I do question the claim. Sorry. And I'm basing that on my own first-hand experience. Again: correlation is not the same as causation.

I simply haven't seen that it takes months to break in an audio component, and it certainly doesn't take years.

@luxmancl38   The size of the teflon cap almost certainly determines the amount of hours it will take to break in. The teflon caps in the ARC preamp were large. 

@cleeds  This isn't a court of law...so your post is a little off, IMHO. The claim that the member made was that he heard that the amp in question was still improving after 900 hours, and i am not going to call him to task for what he heard, not do I have any reason to do so, do you?. That is not the point of my thread, instead, it is as i asked above in my OP.

Hmmm, actually the longest successful maturation time that I have experienced was on an SS digital component: about 3 months of mostly simmering at low volume 24/7, interspersed with actual listening sessions.

Saluti, G.

While I hold the esteemed member who has been referred to in the highest esteem, IMO the only way to meaningfully test this claim would be to perform a direct comparison between two identical components, one of which has been broken in for 1000 hours or so, and the other of which has been broken in for a far lesser number of hours. And with everything else kept equal during the comparison, including the warmup state of those components and all of the other components in the system, the AC line voltage, and the temperature and humidity of the room.

Regards,
-- Al
 

daveyf

... according to our esteemed member, on his review of the product, 900 hours has been reached and he is still hearing advances ...

That's just hearsay and the claim is unsubstantiated. Please note that there's a difference between correlation and causation, something that's discounted in claims like this.

Remember that the ARC preamp that utilized Teflon caps was 'supposedly' only broken in after 600 hours!

Key word: "Supposedly."

I had a CJ ET3 SE w/Teflon caps and it took around 300 hrs to break in. On the other hand my current Luxman CL38U se needed less than 100 hrs. This unit uses oil caps.

@atmasphere  Well that's a good point, but according to our esteemed member, on his review of the product, 900 hours has been reached and he is still hearing advances. 
I suppose another question could be...how long is acceptable 'break in' time for a product? Remember that the ARC preamp that utilized Teflon caps was 'supposedly' only broken in after 600 hours! To me, that seems excessive and should have been done at the factory, others obviously didn't feel this was an issue, as the preamp apparently sold well.

I'm really doubting that much break-in time is needed; the product could never get traction!