In my unending quest to learn what truly matters and what is "old wives tales"( Bullshit in shop talk) in regards to my listening enjoyment, so today's question is about the warming up of our systems.

How long does it take for an amplifier to warm up to optimal temp? What about speakers??  Should my streamer warm up?

I can see where my tubes need to warm up, because tubes run on some sort of magic that I'm not educated enough to understand. I know that there is some sort of electron flow and getters that need to get and other such magic.

I wonder if solid state is the same way?
I recently put together a couple of class A solid state amps and had to bias them so that the outputs were the same. Cold to hot only varied maybe 2%, is that enough to be audiable?

Then I get thinking about speakers, there aren't any interference fits to worry about, so why would they need to warm up?

In saying this, I pretty much always let my equipment warm up for at least a few minutes. I'm famous for switching everything on and going to take a shower or get myself something to drink.

So is it necessary, is it a good practice, or is it just a old wife's tale?

I have a whole list of such things that I want to ask about in the future!

My rule of thumb for anything with a crystal clock is to leave it on. I have witnessed Streamers and DACs benefit more the longer they are on: from minutes to hours, hours to days, days to weeks. Since I'm not patient enough to wait 3 weeks for a DAC to be fully warmed up with OCXO clocks settled before listening, I simply leave them on.

Many quality solid-state amps have a standby feature which keeps most of the internals at optimal temps.

Certainly, tubes sound better to me when warmed up first.

Excellent inquiry.  What has worked best for me is anything that does not require tubes stays on 24/7 (with the exception of my Field Coil speaker drivers…they get hot in those boxes).  Tube gear I like to give a minimum of 10 minutes warmup but they do sound a bit better with more time.  I can get impatient and break that rule on occasion…anyway they still sound great even with less then 10 minutes.  Keep ‘em coming Donnie!

Like James I leave my solid state DAC and phono preamp and transport on all the time. A digital source in my experience takes between 12 to 36 hours to sound its very best after being switched off for over an hour or so.

My Decware amps I turn off when I am not going to be using them for a while, and if I am going to return to them in an hour or two I'll leave them on at low low volume with a disc spinning in the transport. When I was in between wives I would sometimes let the amps run for a few days. They kept sounding better and better and better as the hours slid by.

I’ll throw my hat in the ring and extend this discussion about breaking in capacitors.  When I upgraded the capacitors in my ERR’s to the softball sized Miflex capacitors, I was told the break in time was close to 400 hours by a highly regarded audiophile that Bob Z. knew.  Truth be told as I clocked in time on the speakers, they consistently changed even upwards past 400 hours for the sounded consistent on a regular basis.   I remember either Steve or Bob Z. telling me that if capacitors aren’t exercised within a few weeks… That they need to go into another very small break-in period before they sound I just can’t remember if it was  a few hours or more than that.

That reminds me of the old George Carlin line "You ever notice that your own farts smell ok?"

I think we get habituated to how our broken-in system sounds...we get used to it, then settle into listening to our music. Although there may be "wow" moments of pure bliss, the sound quality doesn't really improve; it remains constant.

When a component is new, and we expect the sound quality to be suboptimal, we still get used to it. When the sound quality changes for the better over time because of "break-in", the number and frequency of "wow" moments increase, undeniably. We "never heard that song sound like that before", and all of the audiophile metric terms are employed to quantify the improvement.

Then, we become habituated to the sound again. The tubes will degrade over time, and like a simmering frog, we probably won't notice for a while. Then fresh tubes return us to the previous glory.

While I do believe in the placebo effect, with high-quality components like Decware in a well-sorted system, break-in is definitely a thing.

Quote:


I can say with 100% guarantee that capacitor break-in is a real thing.  I can remember at least 5 distinct changes that I heard overtime.  They ranged from tinny, flabby bass, lack of micro detail, soundstage depth, lack of cohesiveness.   The first 100 hours were not fun.  

As a point of reference…here’s a pic of the softball sized capacitors wired up to my Err’s.  Mind you this is before I add the second Duelund bypass that is not even pictured.