I recently read a review of the Rotel 1068, a pre-pro I am thinking of mating to my seven 2200's. The reviewer mentioned hearing an improvement of the Rotel over time after it had broken in; come on, these are circuits not speakers, is this possible? The Rotel is $500-600 more than the 990, does anyone have any experience with the Rotel? Gonk, I would LOVE to hear from you on this one. Thanks, the Dog_Lover.

I've not noticed appreciable break-in on any of my electronics. The Rotel 1068 is a pretty good piece of gear - comparable to the Model 950 sonically, although different (some folks preferred the 1068 to the 950, but my wife and I preferred our old 950 when compared to my co-worker's 1068). The 1068 does offer a number of features that the 950 lacked, but the 990 picks up those features and even adds a few to the mix. Considering the sonic upgrade that the 990 made over the 950, I would suspect that the 990 would win out over the 1068 for most people.

You'll find a lot of discussion in earlier threads here about break-in of equipment - here and here and here and here and here are some of my favorite debates on it - informative and enlightening.

I relate the "break-in" phenomenon of solid state devices (which professional cred in the forum seems to dismiss) to experiences as simple as seeing a movie you like many times. The first time you see it, especially in a theater, everything about it is new to you, so your mind has a hard time encompassing it all at once. However, since it so inundated you with stimuli, you come away thinking that you absorbed a lot. The next time you see the movie, you'll know a lot of things that you didn't know the first time, and you tend to notice things in the movie that you didn't notice before since you don't need to focus on them. If you just love the movie and see it many more times, you'll pretty much be at the point where you can now process all of the stimuli in it that your mind is capable of perceiving, and you see it as a much fuller experience than you did the first time. However, the first time you saw that movie, it wasn't any different - the only change was the perception of the observer...you.

Just a theory, of course.

I think that's a pretty plausible explanation for the concept of solid state break-in, certainly as good as any search for physical or measurable changes in performance of solid state components. In fact, it fits well with the one time that I recall wondering if I was hearing break-in (the case that kept me from saying "I've never heard any sort of break-in" in my previous post). That case is when I got a "blue dot" 950: in theory, it was a very familiar piece of equipment (I'd had a 950 in the system for eight or nine months), but it took a few days for it to seem to "settle in" to my system. The changes in the analog section were subtle but enough to seem different, and it took several days to integrate those subtle changes with what I was used to.