Hi-Rez Highway: Re: Ayre C-5xe by Charles Hansen

If I'm doing my math right, you only have about one week to break-in the C-5xe. If you put it on repeat 24/7, it will just be starting to open up and relax after one week. Two weeks of continuous play would be better, and you will probably still notice gains up to four weeks of continuous play.

Another thing to watch out for is re-break-in (warm-up?). If you unplug a player and move it to another house, it could take a day (or more) to get back to where it was (depending on the particular player). This makes casual shoot-outs like that tricky to perform. One thing that helps ameliorate (not eliminate) this problem is to run the sweep tone from the Ayre "Irrational But Efficacious" disc on each player just before you compare them. This will usually get you 80% or so of the way to a full re-break-in. (Don't try breaking in a component by running the sweep tone on repeat. It doesn't sound good to do that, although I have no idea why.)

Another thing to watch for is to use the same set of cables and the same input on your preamp for each unit. The reasoning behind the cables should be obvious (although you would surprised at how many people get sloppy here), but the reasoning behind the inputs may not be so obvious. Basically, the circuit board material also undergoes a break-in process. This happens locally underneath each trace. So each trace needs to be broken in. While it is possible for multiple inputs on a preamp to be exactly equally broken in, it is much safer to assume they are not and just use the same input for each component.

Have fun!