Does Equipment Break In, or Does Our Hearing Adjust?

@jetter 

😊👍 Thanks. I have an in incredible dealer. 
 

If you ever get out this way, give me a holler. Would be great to have you over.

While it does not sound like your experience necessarily has anything to do with breakin. With high end equipment breakin is very real and completely reproducible.

I have experienced and struggled with break-in of audio components for fifty years. It is a pain in the butt… especially when upgrading. Typically high quality components take 600 hours… although the largest portion is done by ~ 200 hours. Typically I don’t hear much change in wires beyond 200 hours, but if I move them in a big way or take them out for a long time and they will need ten or twenty hours to settle down.

All this is completely reproducible and easy to detect for the experienced listener.

I had the experience of breaking in three identical Audio Research Reference 160s amplifiers. I was absolutely amazed at how each followed exactly the same very complicated change in sound. In particular in the 120 hour range after the amps sounded better than at the start, would suddenly sound terrible for a session, then great, then terrible. This flip flop lasted for around 20 hours.

The mind becomes more sensitive to a component at the beginning as you subconscious becomes aware of the sound characteristics. It does’t perceive the sound differently, it becomes able to sense deeper into the nuance.

The Audio Research Reference 5SE preamp required about ten minutes of actual music playing through it each time before it sounded right, even if it had been warmed up for an hour. I thought there was something was wrong with my head. It was absolutely repeatable. I went to a audiophile forum where all the users own high end audio systems (Audio Afficianado) only to find a number of users discussing this peculiarity. The newer Audio Research Reference 6SE does not do this. In fact it needs little warm up to sound perfect.

Anyway, for the experienced audiophile these changes are easy to hear and must be taken into account when creating, upgrading or changing your system. There is no controversy on this subject among audiophiles.

@jetter

As to three REF 160s’s. My dealer got one and thought I would like it… so he brought it over. I instantly loved it and asked him to order me one. He left the first until I received my copy. So, a couple months later, my unit shows up. We swap it. My new one was great… but one of the meters was weak… not a big deal, no hurry… several months go by. My dealer drops by and asked what I want to do… have him replace the meter or get a new one. I say, I don’t care, what would you do? He says, “get a replacement”. He calls ARC, and a couple minutes later a new one is on its way. So, in a couple weeks, I get a new one.

I can’t remember why, but at the beginning of this year my dealer (who has become a friend over the last twenty years) brought over the reference 160m monoblocks… for me to compare. I love them, so he has been nice enough to leave them. So, I currently have both.

These mono-blocks were early copies… not long after they came out. I went down to his store to hear Bruce from Audio Research introduce them. I immediately realized it was finally time to get a tube amp. I decided then to get the stereo version when it came out. It took a couple years or so, but they did, and I did. But having these monoblocks in my system is really gratifying, not only because of how amazing they sound, but because these were the very ones that I heard that caused the pivot in amplification for me… so, important for how my system sounds today. This very amp probably caused one of the most important pivots in my system of all time. My system is now all ARC and exceeds all expectations I have ever had in owning an audio system.