Why warm amps sound better.


Ok, I just turned on my system for the weekend after about 3 days turned off. 
The opening guitar of UFO's Obsession just seemed tinny, edgy.

i know warmed up amps /preamps do sound better, the capacitors are warmed up and sound their best........why?

i had left my stereo on for about 2 days last weekend, and after 24 hours, I was just sitting having a beer, relaxing listening to Metal Church, and noticed my eyes drifting closed, I was not tired, but relaxing, my wife put on her fav cd, Def Leppard's hysteria, the sound was very good, much better than a cold start/listening session.  The guitar tone was full of emotion, soul, just seemed to flow from the speakers to my ears in a magical telepathic way :) I know this is boring, jus stick it out, will ya?

im not going to plug my gear, I just was curious why when amps get nice and toasty, they can sound completely different, almost realistic, with a sound of rapture. 

Its a night and day difference between cold start, and leaving on for a couple days, it's really a huge difference in sound. 

Why do warm capacitors sound so different from cold ones. 
I have tried this with my preamp/amps/cd player. Each one started cold on a different day while the other components were left on.  Each time the sound was harsh, not bad, but noticeable. The amps being cold was the biggest sound change. Followed by the CD player. 

Please explain, I need to kick the volume up a few db's. Thank you
128x128arcticdeth
Relaxing listening to Metal Church ,,, kinda lika chillin to overkill ; )'
   
    yes my gear needs to be on about an hr before it cleans up.Sometimes i flip it all on a cple hrs early and my 20 mnth old changes the plan,only to walk in feel it all juicy warm and flip it off lol
Yup, sunfire is a/b. Doesn't it switch to class H ?
Downconverter goes into class h?
That's right, Sunfire is class A/B. The Carver amps were class G.
I leave my Sunfire turned on 24/7. The sound from the amp at idle for a few hours is clearly better than after a cold-start.

I turn my primary system on about 1 hour prior to a listening session. All electronic parts need to reach thermal equilibrium to operate at proper spec. I believe this to be true even for speaker cones.   
In addition to bias points (operating points) filter caps need to charge up and they charge on an exponential curve. So that last nth degree takes a while. Filter caps are usually electrolytic and electrolytics are funny things, sort of a cross between a real capacitor and a battery (more on the cap side of things though). They are also used as coupling caps in solid state gear and for that reason need some time.

Transistors have a non-linear capacitive element that is inherent in their junctions (which affects the kind of distortion they make). This aspect is affected by heat and voltage (most radios these days are tuned by varactor diodes that take advantage of this effect). That quality of the devices has to stabilize and if the designer did his homework, that happens after a period of time rather than just after the amp is turned on.

IME solid state gear really needs to be on all the time to sound its best, though I have run into to some pieces that actually sounded worse after a day or so.

One might ask why such tiny effects might be so audible and the answer is that it has to do with distortion, and tiny amounts of it at that. But the distortion involved happens to be of a kind to which the ear is actually more sensitive than most test equipment, which is to say that we can measure that the distortion is there in trace amounts but to the ear its pretty obvious. This is because the ear/brain system uses the harmonics that are affected by this distortion (5th harmonic and above) in order to figure out how loud a sound is. So the ear brain system has to be pretty sensitive to do that as our range of hearing is pretty wide from soft to loud.

This is why the tube/transistor thing has been going on for so long BTW. Tubes inherently make less of these higher orders than transistors, which is why they sound smoother.
To add my 2 cents. When I was a kid we left my friend’s Fender Champ guitar amp in the trunk of my hot car for a few hours.

when we plugged it in it sounded better than it ever had.

The BHK 300 amps (dealer alert) have a solid state section meant to stay on all the time and the tube input section is what gets turned on when the front power switch is engaged.

i have even noticed it takes my strain guage phono cart takes some time to warm up and sound better.