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Burn-in Angst


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1 hour ago, marce said:

Question, why do only audio electronics require burn in and no others, even sensitive measuring equipment?

Some of my lab electronics requires a warm-up time of 15 minutes before calibrated accuracy is guaranteed. That's about as far as it goes.

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1 hour ago, marce said:

Question, why do only audio electronics require burn in and no others, even sensitive measuring equipment?

Further how does a PC burn in, is the bit pattern imperfect before it burns in...

Question; how close to the real thing is the image on your computer screen?   I think we can safely say nowhere near. Not even close....small, 2 dimensional and just a few thousand pixels. Compare that to a high end hi-fi system....room filling, three dimensional sound stage and in some cases spookily realistic and 'present', with all the clues that what you're hearing is real. Lip smack, breaths, swallows, fingers on keys, grunts, perfect instrument timbre, reflections off studio or concert hall walls, natural reverb and decay.  Your brain has no problem working with the image on your computer screen but you'd never be fooled into thinking it was the real thing, whereas with hi-fi the best recordings and equipment are getting pretty close. But that trick of fooling your brain is very easily disturbed and that seems to be exactly what's happening with burn-in....enough disturbance to very easily allow you to identify the phenomenon. Small shifts in frequencies, loss of spatial clues, etc.; detail that your PC doesn't get anywhere near producing.  But that's only true for systems and recordings that approach perfection. Where a system isn't getting even close, the disturbance caused by brand new equipment isn't going to make much difference, which is why some people don't hear the burn-in phenomena. There's just too much other stuff going on to disturb the sonic picture.

In a F1 car, a driver will notice a 0.1 bar change in tyre pressure. In most family cars, the majority of drivers need pressure monitors to tell them if a tyre is losing pressure. Its all down to how tuned and finely balanced a system is.  

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2 hours ago, mansr said:

Some of my lab electronics requires a warm-up time of 15 minutes before calibrated accuracy is guaranteed. That's about as far as it goes.

That's temperature stabilisation, on board heating resistors etc. temp sensors, OXCO nice kit steady state operation, far easier than trying to work out resistor values from -40 to +silly. :D

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1 hour ago, Blackmorec said:

Question; how close to the real thing is the image on your computer screen?   I think we can safely say nowhere near. Not even close....small, 2 dimensional and just a few thousand pixels. Compare that to a high end hi-fi system....room filling, three dimensional sound stage and in some cases spookily realistic and 'present', with all the clues that what you're hearing is real. Lip smack, breaths, swallows, fingers on keys, grunts, perfect instrument timbre, reflections off studio or concert hall walls, natural reverb and decay.  Your brain has no problem working with the image on your computer screen but you'd never be fooled into thinking it was the real thing, whereas with hi-fi the best recordings and equipment are getting pretty close. But that trick of fooling your brain is very easily disturbed and that seems to be exactly what's happening with burn-in....enough disturbance to very easily allow you to identify the phenomenon. Small shifts in frequencies, loss of spatial clues, etc.; detail that your PC doesn't get anywhere near producing.  But that's only true for systems and recordings that approach perfection. Where a system isn't getting even close, the disturbance caused by brand new equipment isn't going to make much difference, which is why some people don't hear the burn-in phenomena. There's just too much other stuff going on to disturb the sonic picture.

In a F1 car, a driver will notice a 0.1 bar change in tyre pressure. In most family cars, the majority of drivers need pressure monitors to tell them if a tyre is losing pressure. Its all down to how tuned and finely balanced a system is.  

I beg to differ, I use and have spent a lifetime in front of computer screens... firstly colour matching, these days it's trivial buy a Colormunki, same with printing, how many hours do I spend calibrating my prints, using this:

http://xritephoto.com/colorchecker-passport-photo

so how close to reality can I get my photos if I try, bloody close, before life distracted me I could print out an image and the colours would be almost a perfect match in the same light... But it takes forever and is so technical so are the images, it is not art, the same as reproducing music, the art is creating the music, the reproduction is engineering.

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My amps require about an hour of warm up. But that's because their nominal temperature is that of a medium-size room heater and it takes them that long to reach it.

 

My DDC (SU-1) was measured to have a small change in jitter components after about 90 minutes of warm-up by someone else. But these were so minor that I wouldn't be surprised if they were caused by something else in the test setup or the test environment. For this reason, I always let new components warm up for about an hour before testing them, just to be sure :)

 

 

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2 hours ago, Blackmorec said:

Question; how close to the real thing is the image on your computer screen?   I think we can safely say nowhere near. Not even close....small, 2 dimensional and just a few thousand pixels. Compare that to a high end hi-fi system....room filling, three dimensional sound stage and in some cases spookily realistic and 'present', with all the clues that what you're hearing is real. Lip smack, breaths, swallows, fingers on keys, grunts, perfect instrument timbre, reflections off studio or concert hall walls, natural reverb and decay.  Your brain has no problem working with the image on your computer screen but you'd never be fooled into thinking it was the real thing, whereas with hi-fi the best recordings and equipment are getting pretty close. But that trick of fooling your brain is very easily disturbed and that seems to be exactly what's happening with burn-in....enough disturbance to very easily allow you to identify the phenomenon. Small shifts in frequencies, loss of spatial clues, etc.; detail that your PC doesn't get anywhere near producing.  But that's only true for systems and recordings that approach perfection. Where a system isn't getting even close, the disturbance caused by brand new equipment isn't going to make much difference, which is why some people don't hear the burn-in phenomena. There's just too much other stuff going on to disturb the sonic picture.

In a F1 car, a driver will notice a 0.1 bar change in tyre pressure. In most family cars, the majority of drivers need pressure monitors to tell them if a tyre is losing pressure. Its all down to how tuned and finely balanced a system is.  

 

All very nicely stated. Many people don't or can't evolve their setups to the higher levels you describe, so they have no intuitive idea of what you're talking about.

 

I don't worry about "burn-in" as a behaviour that one categorises; my belief, and goal, is that a system should deliver close to its full potential within 5 minutes from turning on from cold - I have never got anywhere close to that, hours is the usual period needed; but many days is definitely unacceptable. Which means that the sort of burn-in times mentioned here are non-starters for me - I use other techniques for optimising, so that the gains are clearly heard, straight away, or as close to that as possible.

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59 minutes ago, marce said:

I beg to differ, I use and have spent a lifetime in front of computer screens... firstly colour matching, these days it's trivial buy a Colormunki, same with printing, how many hours do I spend calibrating my prints, using this:

http://xritephoto.com/colorchecker-passport-photo

so how close to reality can I get my photos if I try, bloody close, before life distracted me I could print out an image and the colours would be almost a perfect match in the same light... But it takes forever and is so technical so are the images, it is not art, the same as reproducing music, the art is creating the music, the reproduction is engineering.

 

Of interest, my wife has prints made of her artistic endeavours - by a shop that specialises in the highest precision that's probably possible at the moment - the scanner is the highest resolution unit in the country, and is the most expensive bit of kit in that shop, by far.

 

And such attention to detail pays off: you see paintings, and prints in the reception area - and it's close to impossible to pick them apart; you go right up, eyeball inches from the canvas and still can't tell; only the 3D aspect, by touch, and light coming at an angle confirms the situation ... eerily 'real' :P

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5 hours ago, marce said:

Question, why do only audio electronics require burn in and no others, even sensitive measuring equipment?

Further how does a PC burn in, is the bit pattern imperfect before it burns in...

For the same reason that only audio equipment benefits from fancy mains cable upgrades. If the North Koreans ever get their hands on Shunyata mains cables we are doomed

You are not a sound quality measurement device

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2 hours ago, marce said:

Sorry I just wanted to emphasise the difference between warm up and burning in.:)

I'm well aware of the difference. One is real and the other isn't. I mentioned it as an example of what the manuals of lab equipment tell you to do. If burn-in was something that actually happened, the manual would presumably say so too. Of course, they do recommend recalibrating every few years. Not that that has anything to do with burn-in either.

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On 19/02/2018 at 12:07 PM, mansr said:

I'm well aware of the difference. One is real and the other isn't. I mentioned it as an example of what the manuals of lab equipment tell you to do. If burn-in was something that actually happened, the manual would presumably say so too. Of course, they do recommend recalibrating every few years. Not that that has anything to do with burn-in either.

It was for more emphasis to the believers of burn in, not yourself.

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