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Burning/breaking in new equipment?

I am a complete beginner to stereo equipment, never having even owned so much as a record or CD, but I have been reading about it and found what I thought were good deals, so I pulled the trigger this weekend.

The following are on their way:

Benchmark DAC3 (DAC and preamp)
Bryston 4B3 (power amplifier)
KEF R900 (speakers)
XLR cables (from Benchmark)

I have read that new equipment needs to be broken in for about 100 hours. Does that mean I have to play music through them for 100 hours at the same volume I would use when listening or can I play it at a much lower volume?

Note: I am a little worried that the above system might be too bright, sharp or clinical (as I have read about the previous generations of Bryston amps) but I am trying to go for clean, pure, true, honest, accurate, transparent — whatever that means, but I am thinking I want it to sound like what the artists, producers, directors, audio engineers, etc intended when they created, mixed and mastered each track, with nothing artificial added by the equipment. I also went with companies with more solid engineering and less marketing.

.

bobk3

Showing 1 response by williewonka

williewonka
3,110 posts
 
One last thing to add to the above burn-in advice - during the burn-in period you may experience times where the system does not sound as good as it did previously.

This will pass after a few more hours burn-in

e.g. I have cables that sound great initially, but after around 25 hours the system sounded worse than before. By around 60 hours the system started sounding much better and things just improved after that. I observed less focus in the image and clarity suffered.

In my system everything took around 400 hours for everything to sound their absolute best.

One other note: unplugging IC’s and speaker cables and then reconnecting them - you should allow time for them to re-settle - a couple of days is normally adequate.

Regards - Steve
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