The longest? My wife, after 43 years together, still not entirely sure she’s there yet,
The shortest, my Nova just a few months!
Beginning to see where i may have gone wrong when I first met the new office girl in may 1980, 21st may it was, Nova much newer!
I got recently a new Nap 250. Generally with a new component I use to listen one hour then let it burn 24 hours before listening again and observing an obvious change. No accustomation effect.
But here I couldn’t resist listening many hours just after having installed it, specially as the day before I couldn’t because of a defective stock XLR cable.
So now it’s difficult to see real changes, as they are progressive generally. We will see if I detect a change in some days.
I liked them.
Yes, you are very good at describing things Rooster, so would appreciate your honest opinion after burn-in, my hypothesis until then is that the 250DR is better in some areas but I am not sure.
I am clearly delusional!
The longest burn- in I’ve experienced I’d estimate as of the order of 1 mS - i.e. any burn-in has been so short as to have been unnoticeable. When I first got into hifi burn-in hadn’t been invented. Of course with the kit I’ve bought secondhand any burn in will have already happened, otherwise I’ve clearly been lucky or deluded. (But if I were to find the sound below expectation upon purchase, or experience some of the downs described in this forum and attributed it to the kit I’d just bought new, it would go straight back to the dealer.)
I buy most of my kit pre-owned so some of the burn-in period does not apply. But my NDS was an open box straight off the shelf from the national distributor and just had usage at a show, so very few hours. It kept sounding better and better over 2 or 3 months, but then I added a Hi-line and such, so it was sounding better for other reasons.
The absolute longest burn-in for me was after having my Kef R107s rebuilt with new surrounds, crossovers, and replaced the ferrofluid in the tweeters.
It was a minimum of six months for them to settle in, but really, they were still improving at 8 and 9 months.
We’ve been here several times before haven’t we? This is ‘thread closing’ material if pursued to any degree. In fact I’m surprised that a thread on burn-in has actually lasted this long! My comments were really half tongue-in-cheek and not intended to be taken too seriously - more food for thought.
Ha! Same here and so very true. But then neither had equipment supports, and interconnects were just pieces of wire to join things together! A spike was just something that could hurt you if you caught your finger on it and if you had suggested that mains cables sounded different then you were ripe for a place at the funny farm. To suggest a dedicated circuit for the hi-fi on sound quality grounds would have lead to being instantly sectioned.
Yes in those days it was all much simpler. We didn’t know about all this stuff so we just got on with enjoying our music in blissful ignorance of it. Alas Pandora’s Box has now been opened and we can never go back.
My take on burn-in is this. Some hear it - some don’t. Some believe in it - some don’t. In the end none of it matters one hoot. No matter what any of us say or believe it won’t affect the sound of our equipment one little bit. So why bother?
For now, after around 70 hours burn in, I find the new 250 clearly better in all areas. Maybe the 250 dr is a bit more organic, but I really don’t miss it. It’s not however night and day, but easy discernible. When you add a bit more clarity, a bit better defined bass, a bit more free flowing, a bit more refined and juicy, you have something better to my ears, on my system.
Have just realised that I omitted my speakers. Probably took more than a year.
Mike yes I agree speakers will take longer for very obvious reasons, but I ask again how did you arrive at that conclusion? Did you deliberately listen to the same piece at pre-determined intervals and make notes? I very much doubt you did? So there is nothing proven here. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, as you rightly said in an earlier post its perception. And remember I’m not in the run-in is all a myth camp, far from it. All I say is when folks say my 55whatever took 9 months at least caveat it to the effect “to my ears things really improved at the …… point”.
Regards,
Lindsay
I can only estimate as I wasn’t counting but from what I can remember
SW1X DAC 3 balanced. Between 2-3 months
552DR more like 4-5 months - this was the most frustrating one as I had owned a used 552DR 2 years prior. I was convinced the one I had bought had a fault because with the same amps in the 135s it did not sound as good as I remembered. I actually thought I was mistaken in my memory of the last 552DR then months and months later i noticed my system was sounding much better like I remembered my previous setup.
Silver cables - a lifetime Lol.
I sold most of my silver cables and only kept one in my system. Now almost a year later and it has finally burnt in. It now deliveries the lower frequencies with impact and extension. The sound is more nuanced than before and everything sounds more together instead of disjointed bass and treble with very little mid frequency information. I somewhat regret selling the rest but I cannot be bothered to have them built again. My custom Cardas cables have their own magic.
Lastly tonearm cables of any type. I will actually have my new cable ‘cooked’ by a dealer as I’ve read many times they can take an age because the signals they receive are not sufficient to burn them in. Unless of course, you plug and leave for a very very long time. I can confirm my new tonearm cable has been plugged in for about 2 weeks now and even being a copper cable it still sounds off to me. The standard used Vertere cable sounds better as of now.
I would strongly advise against this. An expensive Chord interconnect that I had burnt in on a machine before delivery ended up sounding awful. I returned it and got a new one from another dealer which I just let burn in naturally with normal use. It improved considerably over a few weeks of use but even from new it never sounded as dire as the ‘cooked’ one.
I feel sorry for you @Sloop_John_B . Reading this thread it seems no good deed goes unpunished and no point fails to be missed. I think I can sense the frustration from 6000 miles away.
Only to be expected because as I understand it the Sloop John B was a “dissolute ungovernable” vessel!
Noted. Thank you for saving me the trouble and the money
Depends on how you answer the ‘if a tree falls in a forest and no once hears it…’ question.
If you subscribe to the view that ‘sound’ is a perception generated in the brain then belief will inevitably affect it. If sound is a noise generated independently of the listener then no it doesn’t…
I get what you are saying. Yes, belief may well alter our perception of the sound of our systems. But it will not alter the actual sound - how could it? We are safe in the assumption that there is in fact an actual sound independant of human perception as it is measurable by instrumentation.
Of course if we really wanted to get into it more we could start pondering whether our thoughts themselves might actually affect the sound of our systems physically. I don’t dismiss this - ‘mind over matter’ - there is some evidence that an effect may exist in some circumstances. But that story is for another time children…stay tuned to this channel!
Indeed, I think I’ll stick to starting threads like “What colour is your car?” in future.
.sjb
Yes but then you’d be up against one person’s definition of blue against another. Sorry - I’ll go and have some coffee 
Up to more recently any burn in I’ve experienced has ranged in the 10-20hrs, this includes electronics, speakers, cartridges, etc. After that, if any it would just be small improvements that I wouldn’t be able to be sure if they were improvements or just the ears dialing in. That is till I recently started playing with Furutech Rhodium components, the swings they have in balance is massive, I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t hear it for myself. They take 350-400hrs (when powering components with a decent current draw) before they stabilize.