Quote:
Originally posted by soundhound:
]Actually, that is not really true. There are really no measurements that would apply to things like "break-in" on audio equipment that we have now that we didn't have at least 50 years ago.

Things like jitter measurments used on digital audio equipment have existed for decades, but have just been applied to other areas of electronics. The jitter measuement wasn't invented just for measurement of CD systems.

The mechanisms of change in the characterisitcs of circuitry over time have been known almost since the beginning, and solutions found for cancelling them - if they were'nt, reliable electronics could not possibly exist as they do today. Just think how unreliable things like aircraft would be if the electronics constantly underwent "break-in", changing their characteristics at the whim of the magical silicon's mood. eek

Another fact that that is not mentioned and often misunderstood about modern solid state electronics is that it uses, almost without exception, massive (and I do mean massive) amounts of both local and global negative feedback. One effect of negative feedback is to [b]cancel any changes in the circuit's characteristics. The result is a stable and rock steady circuit, which does not change over time (i.e. "break in").

This is not true of some vacuum tube circuits such as my single ended triode amplifiers, which do not make use of global negative feedback, but only small doses of local negative feedback. In circuits like these, the characterisitcs and sound of the circuit are at the whim of the aging of the emmissive coatings on the cathode of the vacuum tubes. However even given this, any actual change in the sound of these amps is so gradual and subtle that I cartainly cannot hear it. Obviously, this does not apply to solid state electronics at all.

No, certaian fields are vastly more understood than other areas of science. You can't compare the understanding of one science to another directly.

Audio electronics is vastly simpler than other areas. Things liks analog to digital conversion existed long before digital audio did. There are'nt any magical mechanisms going on just because the electrons represent music. wink [/b]
I understand that jitter measurements were available long before the CD player became common place. The point is that no one at that time (the big-hair 80's) considered digital jitter to be important so it was not measured. It took a minor paradigm shift to get beyond the "perfect sound forever" mythos.

My point is simply that I have no doubt that there are many things, even in a simple field like electronics, that we do not understand completely. If our understanding of electronics is complete and cannot be improved, then our universities are wasting a lot of time. money and effort in their engineering programs. In an audio system where you have complex interactions among the source material, electronics, transducers (animate and inanimate) and the environment the probability of unmeasured effects seems more than likely. There are certain basic aspects of all science that transcends disciplines and one of those is that the knowledge in the field is always imperfect unless we assume that we have all the knowledge in that field that exists. No scientific endeavor today has, or claims to have, perfect knowledge.

Also note that I never said I believe in break-in for non-mechanical components as an important phenomenon. I simply refuse to dismiss it out of hand and can accept the fact that some people hear a break-in. Whether it is the system or the user breaking-in remains, in my mind, to be seen.