Or, you can take the path of just listening to music and not worrying about burn-in…leaving a tube amp on when you’re not around seems wasteful and kinda dangerous, and for me it seems that all the other factors like when you do your active listening relative to your local power grid seem to have more of an impact on the sound, although not a big deal. Trying different tubes also obviously has a real effect, and after a short while (hour or so maybe?) they seem to get where they’re going allowing you to hear the differences between tube types or brands. I do think that a well designed amp should sound great all of the time, and only display sonic variations that are so small to be simply musically irrelevant. Power tubes have lasted a long time for me in amps I’ve owned without any cryo treatment or anything other than simply listing to things…and I roll tubes around often enough that many last a really long time until I deem them unlistenable and replace ’em.
