CD player break in?

[sextaafondo]

Just give myself a brand new Cambridge Audio 740C cd player. I read several comments regarding a break-in period of 120 to 250 playing hours for this unit to deliver its best performance, which supposedly is far better than its initial.

I can't tell anything's wrong about the sound right now, and it is WAY superior than my previous Pioneer 1 bit DAC player.

Is this another mith or a real thing?
In case there is some real background behind the consensus, is it about the capacitors stabilizing, the laser unit, or what?

Please leave snake oil theories aside 🙂

 

[Mooly]

If you believe it will sound better after a break in then it will 🙂

Semiconductors and resistors do not change with use. Electrolytic caps could conceivably change their characteristics slightly, although 99.9% of that change occurs in the first few moments of use (such as leakage current reducing etc). You never hear anyone say, "its great out of the box but after a few hours use it doesn't sound as good". Why not ?

Nope... I'm not a believer in break in as such... but I do believe the user gets more comfortable with the product and its sound over time and thus perceives an "improvement".

 

[marce]

About 2 seconds after switch on will suffice....
Personally, I believe the break-in myth is to cover crappy sounding esoteric audiophile gear, such as badly constructed cables, stops people bringing them back.

 

[sextaafondo]

Thanks for your input guys; I'm in line with your reasoning. There are too many people supporting wild theories like this one that make have to ask; you never know when you'd learn something new.

Another happy one with the 740C here. 🙂

 

[adason]

congrats, its a nice cd player, I believe I have the same (I have too much stuff, hard to remember, or getting old)...with dual wolfson as dac

if you have good sound card, record one well recorded song right now to your computer, then a week later do the same, then month later again and again...you will end up having ten copies of the same song, and you can compare for yourself, should be fun

I did this when I recaped old NIKKO preamp, just after putting new caps in it sounded horrible, after few hours much better, and so on, now its a decent preamp, especially the phono section is fine sounding

 

[lduarte1973]

I have both 740C and 640C , the 740C is used as Dac for high frequencies and the 640 as player , both nice machines. The 740 i bought new , the 640C i bought for a few € from someone that gave up because it didnt open the drawer and had the stop button stuck , solved it in 2 minutes with some WD40

about the break in , forget it , that´s true the snake oil

 

[PlasticIsGood]

....solved it in 2 minutes with some WD40...

😱

For cleaning use water or a plastic-safe solvent.
For lubrication use appropriate plastic-safe lubricant.

WD40 is for bodging. And it stinks.

 

[PlasticIsGood]

congrats, its a nice cd player, I believe I have the same (I have too much stuff, hard to remember, or getting old)...with dual wolfson as dac

if you have good sound card, record one well recorded song right now to your computer, then a week later do the same, then month later again and again...you will end up having ten copies of the same song, and you can compare for yourself, should be fun

I did this when I recaped old NIKKO preamp, just after putting new caps in it sounded horrible, after few hours much better, and so on, now its a decent preamp, especially the phono section is fine sounding

Do you still have the recordings? It would be interesting to see if the transformation is detectable analytically.

 

[lduarte1973]

For cleaning use water or a plastic-safe solvent.
For lubrication use appropriate plastic-safe lubricant.

thanks for the advice , only did it once and it´s fine for 1 year now