Best way to burn in new amp?

snow

hearingimpared wrote: »

Actually Bro now that I reread your first post, since this is so old and has been fired up before, and run for only a few hours, you should wake it up slowly. When I first took my Spectral out of storage, (20 years of storage) I called Spectral and asked the engineer there if there was anything in particular that I should do before firing the preamp up. He told me to pop the top and make sure no dust or mosture had accumulated and then advised me to get a variac and slowly wake it up.


If you haven't pluged it in yet for a long period of time you may want to consider doing this. One of the main reasons the engineer at Spectral said to do this was to slowly reform the caps and slowly get the circuitry stabilized by adding varying degrees of voltage to it over periods of time.

Sorry I didn't think of this earlier.

Thanks for the helpful advice Joe.

I talked to him through email and he told me that the only reason he had even fired it up at since he bought it new was for that reason, so the caps wouldndt dry out.

when I got it home the first thing I did was to let it warm up to room temp and then do a visual inspection. It was a long 4 hrs waiting lol.

I wasnt able to see any dust, moisture, or leakage, burned spots etc anywhere thankfully.

Also when I first fired it up I let it run for a few minutes, examined it again then let it run for a few hours and checked one more time, no problems that I could see. Then I let it run all night still in good shape the next morning.:)

One of the things I like about this amp is the incredibily detailed sound it puts out. Also there is absolutley no noise, hiss hum etc which I really like.

And at 105 decibels or so which is plenty for me usally.:D its loafing along using around 15 watts according to the meters. I cant even get it to run warm to the touch at that level. But in a week or so after I let it burn in for a while at (27/7) hours lol I will put it through its paces.

Heres a pic of it with the top down


REGARDS SNOW

Ron Temple

How does it sound in relation to your Carver(s)? I'm trying to get an old Luxman M117 over here to plug in too.

snow

Ron Temple wrote: »

How does it sound in relation to your Carver(s)? I'm trying to get an old Luxman M117 over here to plug in too.

Well there both nice amps. The carver is warmer with a very large soundstage more tube like.

The proton has a very clean detailed sound much better than the carver in that respect, with seemingly endless power from what I can tell so far. It sounds like the adcoms (I have heard) except it is much more detailed. Cleaner mids and highs. With a smaller soundstage than the carver.

It would be intresting to pair the proton together with a good tube preamp and see what thats like.


I suppose it would boil down to what type of sound you prefer.


REGARDS SNOW

Ron Temple

That's my impression of the Carver too. Larger and deeper soundstage, warm, highs somewhat rolled off. I think it's a good combination with the stock SL2000 tweets. The Marantz integrated pushed the sound forward and brightened the midrange and unfortunately the highs got a bit shrill. We'll see how the Luxman sounds, hopefully soon.

The Proton looks like a nice amp...