Burning-in as a non-linear experience

@serblinfan I have experienced what you describe with the Furutech NCF outlets and I believe the culprit is the Rhodium used in the outlet. I have also experienced the variations in sound when using some products that have been deeply cryogenically treated.

I experienced the same with those outlets as I also have the Furu NCF rhodium outlets in my system. But it can't be just that, as people have also reported similar experience with, for example, Black Gate capacitors. So I just thought there could be more to it than just rhodium or cryogenic treatment. 

With speakers and headphones, this has not been my experience; they tend to start off sounding pretty bad, like the various components of the speaker had never met each other, and as weeks go by, they blend together and the speaker sounds like it should after a couple of months. 

Burn in seems to normally be non-linear and varies between components.

A while back I had the experience of breaking in three identical Audio Research Reference 160s amps, without changing anything else in my system. I was very shocked how each went through exactly the same sequence… approximately but not exactly the same as other ARC components.

In general the sequence was that out of the box they sounded a bit trebly and flat. They would gradually improve for about the first 100 hours. Sounding much better. Then wildly fluctuate between bad and good for about twenty or thirty hours. I mean, when I would turn it on, i never know of it was to be Jekyll or Hyde. Then it would settle down and improve slowly… not linearly but at a diminishing rate through 600 hours. What I was surprised is, while really small… there was a small amount of improvement through 1,000 hours and then rock steady.

I have lots of experience with other components as well. But this tends to be how ARC has been in the last twenty years.

On a related issue. Warm up on the Audio Reseach Reference 5 preamps was very unique. Just turning them on was not enough to get the best sound. A signal running through it was required. It was really obvious. You could turn it on for an hour and then sit down and listen to music. The first ten minutes it did not sound that great… and then over about ten seconds the sound quality would improve significantly. It was really obvious and at times seemed to happen over a couple seconds. I thought I had to be imagining this… I had never heard anything like it. I went to a high end forum and I couldn’t believe it. There was a thread about this exact phenomenon.

Reference 6 do not do this, in fact the warm up effect is very small. In general it sounds great as soon as turned on… meaning I hardly ever notice the difference. There is a small difference after ten minutes, but it is very small.