Four Hour Tube Amp Warm-Up


My Primaluna Tube amps require a 4 hour warm-up in order to enter the Glory Zone. My previous Muzishare X7 tube amp was the same. Just wondering if this holds with the experience of other tube ampers.

bolong

Just wondering if this holds with the experience of other tube ampers.

@bolong No. It takes our amps about an hour. About 25 years ago our amps took about 3 hours but component improvements have changed that.

Since I initiated this thread things have changed for the better. Now my set up is sounding very acceptable after an hour warm up. Tweaking has helped.

All the power cables are Anticables, and they are all plugged directly into the wall now except for the cables to the Jay's Audio redbook transport and the Denafrips Terminator DAC  - those cables are still plugged into the Shunyata power conditioner. Running the Terminator in oversampling mode is now better.

Speaker cable is now vintage cloth covered Western Electric tinned multi-stranded 10 gauge wire which is complementing the Primaluna's and the Cornwall 4's with no loss of detail and good PRAT. The bi-wire jumpers are vintage 16 gauge Western Electric pink cloth wire which seems to slightly tame the treble. I tried it with 10 gauge WE jumpers, but the treble ran a bit hot that way. This may or may not be logical from an electrical engineering standpoint since the bi-wire terminals all theoretically end up in the same places internally but..whatever.

I have also been re-burning CD's from .flac to .wav (in JRiver) and think they sound better perhaps because of less computing in the signal chain and therefore slightly less noise.

Also discovered a 12au7 tube that was microphonic. Replaced it and now the background is much blacker. Also reinserted some vintage 12au7 Amperex "Bugle Boys" into the signal positions, and this has helped quite a bit. The Primaluna's do not like "alien" 12au7's, but just the Bugle Boys as signal tubes are doing fine.

Also, built some floor attached angling guides for the speakers so that they can be pivoted predictably and in perfect unison relative to each other and the back wall, and the distances between them can be exactly gauged relative to my listening chair. This has improved sound-staging quite a lot.

Tweak City over and out.

 

 

Same here... With the little soundartist el-34, 4hrs is needed to sound best.

bolong +1; a weak tube can take a long time to warm up properly

Where is @tubebuffer these days?
As Confucius say, “Man with strong tube, need little time to warm up.”