The Importance Of Breaking In Your Hi-Fi Equipment

A lot of money is spent on today's hi-fi equipment so it makes sense to try to get the best out of it in terms of sound quality.

Breaking in your hi-fi equipment is often overlooked. This will lead to the audio and visual performance being compromised for a long period of time.

It is important to 'break' or 'burn' in any piece of your hi-fi but the process has a bigger effect as the cost of the equipment increases.

This article will be explaining the breaking in procedure. There is also a way of speeding up the whole process while still obtaining the same results.

So firstly, what is meant by 'breaking in' your hi-fi?

It is essentially the process of warming up your hi-fi components to the point where they are outputting all of their frequencies at the optimal level.

In other words, once your audio equipment is fully warmed up it will begin to sound and look at it's best.

What is often overlooked though, is that this 'burning in' procedure can take up to 100 hours of continuous play to achieve the best results! If you have ever read 'What Hi-Fi?' you may have noticed that they will not review a product until it has been burned in for at least 72 hours.

There are a couple of ways of doing this.

The obvious method is to switch on your new components such as a CD player, press repeat and leave it playing for 3 days! This works just as well as the quicker alternative that I will tell you about. The down side is the amount of electricity that this can use. Also, it simply may not be possible if you do not have an exclusive room to host a continuous 3-day disco!

Thankfully, there is a quicker, more energy-efficient way of breaking in your hi-fi equipment. It does come at a relatively small cost.

There are now CD's available which will play back a sequence of sounds at different frequencies and will fully break in your components in around 40 minutes.

The one I found in the UK is from Isotek. It has 3 tracks on the CD. Two of them burn in large and small speaker systems with the 3rd track containing a 5 minute sequence to warm the components before each play.

The tracks are also designed to remove magnetic interference from the electrical signals passing between the pieces of equipment.

There are other available sound files such as 'BurnIn' that can be downloaded and will play back combinations of white, pink and brown noise and will have a similar effect.

It is highly advisable to be breaking in your hi-fi equipment before you can really appreciate the quality of your new purchase. If this is ignored it could be months if not years before you are hearing the music as the manufacturers had intended.