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In the Forum: Audio For Dummies ™
In the Thread: Do not touch that used tonearm!
Post Subject: A long tail of “formatting misery”….Posted by Romy the Cat on: 2/1/2007
 darkmoebius wrote: |
I asked Jim Hagerman how long it takes to break in interconnects, power cords, speaker, cables, and preamps?
He replied - "Usually about 40-50 hours on a FryK. The amps are fastest and get most of the way overnight. Silver wire takes about twice as long as copper." And, as usual, he was dead-on right. Really makes cable auditioning a lot less taxing because you can do long series connections of many cables (using connectors) and be sure they are all burned-in at the same time. |
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Hmmmmm, I disagree. I do not know what kind of signals the FryK makes. I have made and stolen from different sources a large collection of VERY torturinging burn-in signals, they all live on my DAW. Usually the length of the “formatting” is back-proportional to current, but there are exceptions. My equipment and my cables (liquid damped) can not be burned by higher current and I burn then of with cure of the same value as the cable will be caring during it live-span. Sure it mostly would depend on the specific cable and the specific equipment use but to make generalizations…
Tube electronics usually need ~200 hours before it become more of less “compiled”. Cables…. It is all depends of the cable and current. The line-level interconnects need ~200 hours, the phono-level need > 1000hours. Interesting that if it a component or a cable was not used for a long time then the ‘formatting” should start form scratch. SS amps are different and I never was able to catch what they need. The Lamm M1.1, the last new SS that I owned needed 200-300 hours to get itself “into the mode” and it was king off freaky as it demented to be used dally in order do not sound “too granular” – almost like the old Nissans that might run up to 400.000 miles if your drive then dally, but that die on you if they unused. (M1.1 still had a lot of that residual “granularity” but it is another story).
With digital it is funny. Usually all new digital that I have seen sounded fine at the very first evening after it was opened. The next day it dives into misery. It usually takes from 100 to few hundreds hours for digital to be formatted and then… who cares… we never turn it off…
A replacement of a single electrolytic cap on PS do require some time until unit sound become as it use to. I religiously do not use idiotic audio electrolytic, juts hate their sound and I use the regular commercials caps. (Nichicons are the best or some series of Corner Dubilier as a replacement – they do fine to my ears). So, the new Nichicons have no bass and have funny dynamic. After a week the bass show up but then during the next 30-40 days sound become “wondering”. Bass pop up “here and there”, imaging fly all over, the granularity of sound fluctuates… Usually it takes 30-40 days to settle everything down..
So the 40-50 hours that Jim commented was a good period to have juts initial first improvement but then there is a longer tail of “formatting misery”….
At least I was my experience….
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