Queston On Burning In A New Preamp

I wrote about burn-in on the ASR forum for the 2 imersiv D-1 DACs that I had in the house with 0 hours on them. I had a lot of great comments on that post.

Recently I was reading about how crappy a Meitner MA3i DAC | Allnic ASRA headphone amp | RAAL 1995 Magna sounded recently at the NYC CanJam 2026.

Well 2 months earlier I had the same 3 items in my house with the Meitner MA3i DAC with 0 hours. Using the Ethernet streaming on the DAC was unlistenable for about 20 hours. The USB was not as bad with my fibre optic streamer.

My friend was demoing the 3 pieces at a mini-CanJam in Denver in January 2026, so I tried to help him out but putting about 30 hours on the Ethernet streaming of the DAC. It still was not great but better than 0 hours. Luckily when it was demoed at the Denver meet, I was able use my Sonore OpticalRendus to stream into the USB input which did not need the same amount of burn-in.

I then got the Denver Meitner MA3i to my house for 3 weeks and just played on the Ethernet streaming input. After about 100 hours the sound was almost as good as the fibre optic. I could live with the Ethernet now. At 0 hours my ears were in pain.

The DAC at the NYC CanJam was not the one I had at my house. Same model but different unit.

No as long as you are playing through it with preamp on it is feeding signal 

that is for sure !

How will you know if the burn in made a difference if you aren't istening to it?

@stevehardy1 

I’m toying with getting the PMG preamp myself and will be very interested in hearing your thoughts. 
 

And as far as burn in,  most of the components only need a few minutes, but capacitors take longer, with the electrolytic cans taking the longest. I used to travel a lot and I’d unplug my equipment while I was gone. If I was gone more than a couple weeks, I could hear the difference in the sound when I came home. I’m retired now and I try to listen to at least one album a day so I leave all my equipment either on or on standby.

Next to the interconnects and speaker cables, this is a topic with wast opinions and debate.  Given that, and my many years of going through hundreds of components and systems, I generally take the folks who have all in or all out opinions with a grain of salt.  Last year I did a seven dac shootout, and I followed the same pro ess.  I hook up the new component, let it run for 1 hour and then I take the same reference songs and listen to it for an hour and take copious notes regarding fairly standard audiophile parameters.  I quit listening for 50 hours and then listen again, and take notes about those same parameters.  I rinse an repeat at 100 hours and then again at 200 hours.  I have four systems, with each system have both a tube path and a solid state path.  The large system shares a pair of Estelon X Diamond Mk 2's and the small system uses Joseph Audio bookshelf speakers.  This took several months.  A lot of work, and money, but Iearned a lot about many things.  All systems changed after the break-in period.  Some changed more than others.  I am an Electrical Engineer, so  I am pretty disciplined and detailed oriented:-)  I have done this with many other components besides dacs.  I think, next to dacs, power amps change the most.