Burn-in and 'break-in' are two entirely separate concepts with respect to electronic systems. One has an engineering or scientific basis while the other would appear to me to be marketing hype. As mentioned in posts above, burn-in is an established procedure for almost any system, be it mechanical, electronic (digital or analog) etc. Burn-in is to find infant mortality issues. Break-in on the other hand, implies an improving of the system over time. I can readily understand break-in as it applies to mechanical systems for in those systems there are physical mechanisms (friction, stress, stiffness, creep etc) that change over time. These changes could perfectly well result in an improvement of sound, much as a new shoe fits the foot after a month of wear. There are no such mechanisms in electronic systems that would explain an 'improving' of a system over time. On the contrary there are a number of physical mechanisms that would contribute to a deteriation in performance. (vibration, moisture ingress, electromagnetic radiation, lightning electromagnetic pulse, static discharges, photon impingement on P-N junctions from outer space etc) Of course, deterioration of performance could manifest itself as an audible 'difference', but it is surely not a feature that was intended by the system designers.
I am an instrumentation & control systems engineer (EE) in the petrochemical business. We have many electronic systems still working today that were installed in the 60's & 70's when electronics replaced pneumatic instrumentation. Power supply electrolytic capacitors have a life of about 10-15 years, but for the base electronics we do not see wear out problems even after 30 years or so. Systems tend to get replaced because of lack of vendor support, not really inherent reliability concerns (a generalisation of course). Given that electronics does not appear to 'wear out',(= does not change in performance over time), what mechanism exists to create a possible 'break-in' (= sound improvement over time) phenomenon? Beats me. Digital systems represent another problem area since they often have software (or firmware) coding embedded within the 'electronics'. There are however no 'wear-out' issues with software. Of course that does not mean there are no 'bugs' (as we all know). Bugs exist for the lifetime of the product, or until they are removed by a program update, but they only manifest themselves when the correct set of circumstances exist to cause the bug to 'pop up'. Sometimes acceptable & sometimes not. The presence of 'bugs' in software and the reduction in number of such bugs as the product improves, has been likened to 'burn-in' of mechanical systems, even although the phenomena is recognised to be inherently 'different'. But in terms of 'break-in' of software affecting audio quality, I do not believe this is a meaningful physical phenomenon. (of course, always excepting the digital nature of software in that it could render the sound to be a 1 or a 0 ie, on or off). All imho of course. dan -- chinablues ------------------------------------------------------------------------ chinablues's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7955 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29025 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
