[Audiophile2019]

Way to go, bro.. It won't be very long... BTW I just reached 300 hours this morning (230 hours on balanced + 70 hours on unbalanced).. Need another 130 hours more to go..

Thank God.. Finally completed audio burn-in for both 4.4mm balanced & 3.5mm single-ended ports after 4 months owning this NW-ZX300 .. Total 450 hours = 245 hours & 205 hours played on each ports respectively (after meticulous monitoring & record-keeping) .. Pheww!

 

[Leetransform25]

Thank God.. Finally completed audio burn-in for both 4.4mm balanced & 3.5mm single-ended ports after 4 months owning this NW-ZX300 .. Total 450 hours = 245 hours & 205 hours played on each ports respectively (after meticulous monitoring & record-keeping) .. Pheww!

And I thought I was the only one paranoid enough to track playback times... Damn!

 

[ailean]

And I thought I was the only one paranoid enough to track playback times... Damn!

I'm currently burning in the AptX output some more, once I've reached 200 hours I'll move onto the AptXHD output or maybe the LDAC output, depending on what works on my next headphones.

 

[Leetransform25]

I'm currently burning in the AptX output some more, once I've reached 200 hours I'll move onto the AptXHD output or maybe the LDAC output, depending on what works on my next headphones.

As far as I know, burn in only occurs when the ZX300 is used with a wired connection as the capacitors won't be utilized when used wirelessly.

 

[Lurk650]

4 months "burning in", can you hear a difference, or was all that time just wasted?

 

[Leetransform25]

4 months "burning in", can you hear a difference, or was all that time just wasted?

Who's post are you referencing? From my experience improvements weren't massive, but definitely noticable

 

[Lurk650]

Who's post are you referencing? From my experience improvements weren't massive, but definitely noticable

Audiophile, as well as you, and anybody else who has let their player "burn in". During this process are you guys actively also listening to it consistently or just letting it play the whole entire time and never touching it.

 

[FrankieZappa]

After a couple of months I gotta say this little baby is wonderful. Burning in,in my opinion,helped. I feel the sound “richer”.

There is only one major letdown however: album art.
Frankly i’m tired of downloading art images from google,try to figure out if they are progressive jpegs and if they are trying to save them as normal,embedding them with mp3tag and finally transferring music onto the player..only to find out missing art.
This thing is driving me mad.

 

[Leetransform25]

After a couple of months I gotta say this little baby is wonderful. Burning in,in my opinion,helped. I feel the sound “richer”.

There is only one major letdown however: album art.
Frankly i’m tired of downloading art images from google,try to figure out if they are progressive jpegs and if they are trying to save them as normal,embedding them with mp3tag and finally transferring music onto the player..only to find out missing art.
This thing is driving me mad.

Have you tried using a website that checks if an image is progressive for you? It makes things a lot easier for me.

 

[Mathieulh]

The "Burn-in" process does not happen over bluetooth as you aren't using the amplifier section of the DAP (specifically the capacitors)

Because 4.4mm and SE outputs use different capacitor/amplification circuitry, each need to be burned in separately on the ZX300. Whereas most (but not all) other (non Sony) DAPs usually share capacitors in between balanced and SE (Balanced using one more set of capacitors for the extra separate channel), so burning-in the balanced output in this case would also burn-in the SE part.

 

[Hinomotocho]

After a couple of months I gotta say this little baby is wonderful. Burning in,in my opinion,helped. I feel the sound “richer”.

There is only one major letdown however: album art.
Frankly i’m tired of downloading art images from google,try to figure out if they are progressive jpegs and if they are trying to save them as normal,embedding them with mp3tag and finally transferring music onto the player..only to find out missing art.
This thing is driving me mad.

I used to use mp3tag but one day had issues with a lot of the art.
I switched to TagScanner which has an option to recompress existing art, which for some reason 99.9% of the time works - easy peasy as the other methods seemed a bit more time consuming.

 

[U2Joshua]

There is only one major letdown however: album art. Frankly i’m tired of downloading art images from google,try to figure out if they are progressive jpegs and if they are trying to save them as normal,embedding them with mp3tag and finally transferring music onto the player..only to find out missing art.
This thing is driving me mad.

I'm not sure if this might be helpful or not, but I have found that downloading artwork from iTunes works without fail. To be clear, you don't need to be an iTunes user, or even use iTunes to grab or populate the artwork within your files.

Here is a website that allows you to access iTunes Album Artwork, which can be downloaded in either 600x600dpi or a higher resolution 1500x1500 --> 4000x4000dpi, depending on the release.

https://bendodson.com/projects/itunes-artwork-finder/

I've never had trouble with any of iTunes' artwork not populating on the NZW-ZX300.

 

[Audiophile2019]

Audiophile, as well as you, and anybody else who has let their player "burn in". During this process are you guys actively also listening to it consistently or just letting it play the whole entire time and never touching it.

Definitely, bro.. Sound got warmer & richer while soundstage seemed bigger.. As a matter of fact, after 10-20 hours, you should start noticing the difference already.. But as you burnt in longer, the incremental improvement got more subtle.. The law of diminishing return came to play.. How I wished Sony provided 2 separate meters for balanced & SE ports - that will make it easier to keep track..

 

[Leetransform25]

Definitely, bro.. Sound got warmer & richer while soundstage seemed bigger.. As a matter of fact, after 10-20 hours, you should start noticing the difference already.. But as you burnt in longer, the incremental improvement got more subtle.. The law of diminishing return came to play.. How I wished Sony provided 2 separate meters for balanced & SE ports - that will make it easier to keep track..

Yeah, I really agree with this. Luckily (but not that lucky though) my 4.4mm cable took 2 extra weeks to get to me due to mistakes made during shipping, so in the meantime I was able to individually burn it in. Otherwise trying to keep track of SE and balanced simultaneously would've been confusing haha

 

[FatherVic]

What is it that actually happens during this burn in? If the sound changes during the use of a product, surely that would be electrically measurable in some way?
I remember another forum I was in where an engineer would say there was no such thing...

IIRC in this thread that burning in was only became effective when when hitting higher volumes. What kind of level should someone be running to do so?