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Cable Burn In

I'm new here and new to the audiophile world. I recently acquired what seems to be a really high end system that is about 15 years old. Love it. Starting to head down the audiophile rabbit hole I'm afraid.

But, I have to laugh (quietly) at some of what I'm learning and hearing about high fidelity.

The system has really nice cables throughout but I needed another set of RCA cables. I bit the bullet and bought what seems to be a good pair from World's Best Cables. I'm sure they're not the best you can get and don't look as beefy as the Transparent RCA cables that were also with this system. But, no sense bringing a nice system down to save $10 on a set of RCA cables, I guess.

Anyway, in a big white card on the front of the package there was this note: In big red letters "Attention!". Below that "Please Allow 175 hours of Burn-in Time for optimal performance."

I know I'm showing my ignorance but this struck me as funny. I could just see one audiophile showing off his new $15k system to another audiophile and saying "Well, I know it sounds like crap now but its just that my RCA cables aren't burned-in yet. Just come back in 7.29 days and it will sound awesome."
n80

Showing 2 responses by andy2

andy2
1,573 posts
 
The accusation that "burn - in" is more psychological than real only works for the average buyer since he mostly likely purchase a pair of cables and has rely on his memories to tell the difference when he bought it brand new and now.

But this accusation does not work for cable manufacturers because they have a bunch of them lying around - some brand new, some has been used for awhile.  So there is no need to recall any "memories" since they can compare side by side brand new cables and old cables.  So if they can hear the difference then there is such thing as "psychological".
Cable manufacturers has nothing to gain by this.  If you bought a cables and it sucks, you call the manufacturer, they tell you to wait until so and so hours.  If after that it still sucks, then they got nothing to gain, because it's still suck.  
andy2
1,573 posts
 

First, cables are just more than resistance. It has inductance and capacitance as well. But that is not the whole story. The inductance and capacitance are distributive so the rated inductance per foot or capacitance per foot don't tell the whole story either. Also the inductance and capacitance is frequency dependent so it gets even more complicated. Not only that inductance and capacitance are current and voltage dependent so it gets even more more complicated.

Now it's not just the metal. It's the dielectric material which are also current, voltage, freq. dependent.

So you can see. Hopefully you can see.

 

Now as for the measurement, how can you measure the effect of burn-in?

It can be measured but it's not that simple and you need some pretty sensitive equipment. Some stuffs from Fry’s is not enough. Not only that you need a fairly complicated setup to capture things in time domain and you need some serious fourier transform software to analyze the data.

 

Now you want to know how a cable burn-in? Just run some 20A current through some tiny wire and see if it burns.

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