How much does volume matter when breaking in amps and cables?

mijostyn pleads:

Undoubtedly, electronic equipment drifts slowly overtime as some component values shift with recurrent heat cycles although I have never seen objective evidence of this. There is no electronic device that I know of that changes its characteristics in the first several hours of usage.

So you know electronic equipment changes, and yet there is none that you know of that changes. Fascinating.

mijostyn again:

Maybe class A or highly biased AB amps sound a little different after they heat up although having had several class A amps I have never been able to hear this

That would appear to be the problem then, wouldn’t it? You can’t hear it.

mijostyn, stepping in it Big Time:

I own two 911s a 2006 Speed Yellow C4S and a 2014 Guards Red Turbo S. Porsche’s break in recommendation has always been "keep it under 4000 rpm for the first 2000 miles." Absolute torture but there is no substitute.

You must be new here, or at any rate not following me long enough to know I’m a PCA Driving Instructor (Driver Ed, Autocross, Driver Skills), and former PCA Region President with something like 200k miles personally driven on his 79 SC that has been rebuilt, good friends with scads of Porsche techs. Can you say, oops?!?

First off, the factory break-in that is in "the" manual is different depending on which country the car is sold in. Same car. Different laws. That 4000 rpm has nothing to do with break-in. Sorry. But you could look it up.

Now what’s really interesting, not only for Porsche but all internal combustion engines, the one thing that really does need to be broken in a certain way early on is piston rings.

Very high (read, full throttle) loads very early on (first few miles) are needed to seat the piston rings. What happens is that even highly machined parts still have some fine sharp peaks at the micro level. Subjected to high pressure these will wear on each other in a way that facilitates a better piston to cylinder wall seal. But these peaks are very fine and wear away very quickly whether babied or driven hard. The problem is if you avoid full throttle early on then by the time you do it they are smooth and you lose the benefit.

This is why you never hear anything about Porsche (or anyone else, this is universal to piston engines) breaking in their racing engines for thousands of miles. For damn sure they want their LeMans engines to last. Yet they do not break them in by babying them around at low RPM. This is why if you take factory delivery in Leipzig where they have a track right there and ask if you need to baby your brand new car they will say, "NO! Warm it up, then drive it as hard as you want. That’s what it’s made for."

Experience and knowledge, mijostyn. Imagination is no substitute.

Near as I can tell the whole break-in thing goes back to horses. Wild horses do not particularly care to be ridden. We say they are spirited. You have to break their will. You have to break them. If anyone knows about anything further back than that let me know.

Then you think there's a debate with amps? Try Porsches! The factory has a recommendation, and for many the factory is sacrosanct. Even when they learn the factory says different things in different countries about the exact same car! 

The truth turns out to be the one thing that really needs it is piston rings. Only full throttle loads very early on (from the first few miles) are capable of properly seating the rings. Which knowing that isn't it interesting Synergistic Research gets big improvement using a Tesla coil to zap a million volts through their brand new cables?

But do you think any manufacturer is gonna tell their customers to do that? Warm it up, run it to redline, as hard and as often as you can. Run a million volts through it. Yeah. Right.

No. They are gonna say baby it. They are gonna say it takes hundreds of hours. Because by then, in both cases, you are gonna get used to it. Whatever "it" is. 

Here is my experience: If a component does not sound good "out of the box" I do not believe any amount of break in will change my mind. However, I notice components open up a bit more after some hours of playback. Now, I'm not into the 500-800 (or whatever) hour deal, but I think things slightly improve with a few hours of playback. The rough edges (floabt) smooth out.

In my original post I was wondering if volume has an effect on break in or is turning on the component with low volume sound enough.

Correct. As I have noted many times- if its good then its good right out of the box. Everything will of course change and improve over time. But the essential character heard from zero will always be there. If not, if you don't like it right away, don't waste your time.

There really is no debate about break-in. There are only people who have never bothered to either develop the listening skills to hear it, or even taken the time to try. (You can for that matter replace "break-in" with power cord, interconnect, any number of things, and then write the exact same sentence.) The debate is settled as far as "does it happen" and only "can you hear it" remains.

The biggest challenge for most is just learning to listen and hear it. For those who wonder, here's what happens: the first few minutes running the essential character is there but grainy and harsh and lacking fine harmonic structure, subtle nuance or detail. Within minutes this etched skeletal quality begins transforming becoming much more smooth and filled out and liquid. Dynamic shadings nowhere to be found in the beginning become plainly evident later on. Eventually if the component is good enough it gets to palpable presence, that eerie feeling where there are so many subtle details coming through so effortlessly its like you are feeling it more than just hearing it.

For people like zarathu who find this impossible, well isn't it odd that I am able to explain so clearly and in such detail what you think I am not even able to hear? The simplest explanation is I know what I'm talking about, however hard that may be to believe.

But hey, another thing I'm constantly saying: DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT! Go hear for yourself.

Take whatever fuse you have that is easily replaced and swap out it out for one that is brand new. The brand new fuse will have zero hours on it. First make sure everything in your whole system is on and thoroughly warmed up. The same crappy sound you are going to hear from the new fuse is the same crappy sound you are going to hear from cold anything. So warm it up. Sit back and listen. Then swap the fuse and listen again.

Then when you get to where you can easily hear such things, repeatedly and reliably, then you will be in a position to say that no, the volume level does not matter. What matters more than anything else is time. The vast majority of burn-in improvement occurs in the first few minutes to hours. Beyond that many components continue to improve some of them yes for a hundred hours or more. But the vast majority occurs right away, and so fast you will if you are a good listener be able to hear it on the fly as it happens. 

Then once you get past the first few dozen hours or so, somewhere in there, the warm-up factor starts to come into play. You can think of this as whenever anything is turned off more than a short time, overnight say, it is almost as if it goes back to being like new again. That is to say, when you first turn it on it is not going to sound very good. But then within a fairly short time, could be 10 minutes, could be an hour, its going to stabilize and sound great again. Instead of burned-in we say warmed-up but it is the same only different, as they say.


 

I enjoy few things more than listening to a component as it burns in. The changes are just fascinating, especially the first few minutes to hours. Speakers, amps, cables, even fuses. Just one of the most amazing things, and I listen closely every time. In 20+ years I have heard no evidence volume matters at all.