QX-5 Twenty and AX-5 Twenty - Break In Each Output/ Input?
 

Here is a question for Ryan,

I have a QX-5 and AX-5 Twenty I have been running for about two years. I have been using ONLY the single ended outputs and inputs.

I am auditioning BALANCED cables. The question is, do the two units require additional break-in on the balanced output on QX and balanced input on AX because those sets of outputs/inputs have never been used? I am talking about less than 5 hours on those inputs and outputs. Does each connection require break-in to reach full performance?

Thanks!

According to Ayre, every input and even every volume setting has to be seperately broken in.

Full potential? Yes, unfortunately. The break-in process is pretty closely tied to the dielectrics in a number of the components as well as the PCB material. We've found the material we select can have a pretty big effect on the amount of break-in time required, though it seems the longer the time needed, the better the product sounds in the end (that seems to be the way with all things, doesn't it?) At any rate, because we use different components for each input instead of simply tying them all together, there's separate signal paths and components involved for all inputs and outputs.

Now here's the "but"...with all that said, the percentage of break-in vs. not having broken it in at all is going to be pretty tiny. We're picky and specific at Ayre, sometimes annoyingly so, when we use terms like "best" and "optimum", so the gains of breaking in the input isn't going to be night and day like a fresh unit vs. a unit with 500 hours on it, but it can still yield a small improvement. For what you're talking about, I think you'll be just fine; particularly if you're comparing A to B balanced. Even if you were listening to balanced vs. single-ended, I suspect you'll notice the difference right away the differences. Hope that makes sense.

Ryan
Just curious why don’t manufacturers break in units at the factory?

No thanks! I’d rather get my unit sooner rather than later! [emoji2]

Yes. That makes perfect sense. Thank you!

Grubhub pretty much nailed it. The amount of time to properly break in varies from series to series, and certainly from manufacturer to manufacturer. For most of our gear, we're looking at a solid 500 hours of break-in time for the active lines we offer today. That would require an active systems in place that could feed signal to the units for 21 days with a simulated load over the speaker posts...then you get it home and still need to break in your cables and speakers if everything is new.

The facility space required to do that would require about 3 times the space we occupy now, which in turn would ramp up costs per unit considerably and inevitably cause delays because we didn't think about 10 people ordering a VX-R in black a month ahead of time, etc. Sales in our industry are not terribly consistent, making the demand fairly difficult to predict ahead of time. The other option would be to burn them in after the order was placed, but not many people would be too comfortable with waiting another 21 days for our technicians to hand-build the unit; which already takes longer than we'd love for it to take to get you your units. So in the end, it just seemed not practical to do. But believe me, the idea had crossed my mind a time or two!

It would also cause sales of the wildly popular platinum selling “Irrational but Efficacious” break in disc to plummet!

Ryan,

Any updates coming forward on the QX 5 that would improve the SQ, and if any would be coming forward would it be with both ethernet and usb.

None that we have come up with yet. The QX-5 is still a newer product in terms of how long our products are usually around, and frankly I haven't heard anything that sounds better than it yet. There's some various reliability/feature improvements we're always working on, but haven't come up with a better circuit design since we implemented the QX-5.