Break in for new DAC

OK and with expectation of a pile on and I stress IMHO, 200-300 hours is absolute nonesense, dripping with the secret sauce known as expectation bias!

DAC’s generally need no real break in period past voltage and component stability at most a couple of hours out of the box, then and in your situation, a few minutes for the tubes to warm up in daily use.

Your Ray tubes have already gone through long periods of quality testing and matching, so at worst long enough for them to stabalize from cold is all that’s needed.

I run a EAR Yoshino 912 all tube pre and a fully restored and upgraded stereo tube power amp, with a Lumin X1 streamer. Lumin say leave the power-supply on and the unit in standby (I think aound 5-8 watts) it is then literally seconds before it performs optimally (now that is honesty) Even new out of the box they are confident that a few minutes stabalization is all that’s required.

I allow the Pre Amp about 15 minutes as per the late great Tim de Pavaracini’s advice, since the preamplifier was soak tested before going to the customer and thier tubes had been hand picked for matching and performance characteristics.

The Power Amp with all that heavy Iron and huge filter cap reservoirs, is a slightly different beast of course. I have noticed that its sound does improve from cold switch on and over time since the open heart surgey it has seemed to improve. I was psycologically expecting that as there are electronics and physics that are known parameters, at work.

So I have adopted a soft on regime which is 15 minutes in heater only mode, then switch in HT circuit using the standby allow 10-15 minutes and all is optimal and kind on the amplifier.

I understand some time for a speakers to improve as they are electromechanical components and newly constructed drivers although tested, will benefit from a few hours of running in and some manufactures do this for cones surrounds and spiders to get used to their marriage but beyond 20 hours or so of varied program input, I’d say the changes would be negligible.

If manufacturers really believe this craziness, then how are they evaluating the sound of their products in a quality control environment? Maybe they should be "running" or "burning" in the gear before shipping to the retailer or customer.

Why should the customer have to "run in" or condition their product for them, its an extra cost to be added to the purchase price. How will they ever know that it sounds the way the manufacturer intended?

200-300 hours before it peforms as it should is nearly 43 days of constant use 8 hours a day!

Maybe this is manufacturers exploiting HiFi Folklore in making sure the customer gets psyco-accoustically conditioned to the sound of a product than that product changing over time.

Especially film capacitors—they really take time. Last time, my Harmony Micro DAC needed at least 150 hours to fully break in before the richness of tone and spatial cues finally settled.  I almost return it.

@mlapenta Disregarding tubes, almost every piece of equipment which uses electrolytic caps (pretty much everything we use), will take time to 'burn in'/'run in', often in the order of 200/300 hours. This is especilally true of devices which don't run 'hot' when in use, ie (non tubed) DACs. You should never ever turn a SS DAC off, or a SS pre-amp, as they will take days to fully warm up. The owners manual of my old Jeff Rowland Research pre amp said in the manual to never turn it off, as it WILL take in excess of 5 DAYS to warm up before giving its full potential. Nelson Pass, the designer of my Threshold (not a Class A version btw) power amp says the same thing - never turn it off.

But 'burn in' is a different subject to warm up times. This is a definite phenomenon, and anyone who denies it either cannot hear it or just doesn't want to believe it - reverse expectation bias. My current Denafrips Venus 15th sounded dull and lifeless out of the box (after 5hrs of warming up out of the box), but improved markedly over the following 4 weeks, playing Radio Paradise 24/7. A similar thing was noticed with my previous DAC, the Pontus 15th, which replaced my Cambridge Azure 851N. It sounded very disappointing when new, NOT cold, but after several hours of warming up. After a few days it was clearly much superior to the CA device, and after c2 weeks sounded wonderful. As lanx0003 says, it's mainly the film caps that need time.

@abenavraham You clearly have very little between your ears! Maybe your ears are not working correctly?

@nubiann You are extremely nieve if you think manufactures have the time and space to put each and every piece of equipment through a 300hr burn in process! You also seem very confused in your own beliefs - one minute saying it's all rubbish, then saying you use a warm up regime before listening! Make your mind up; which is it?

+1 bigtwin