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
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Sorry that I don't have the time nor bandwith to argue the old stuff re expectation bias, blind studies, anecdotal experience. I CAN tell you that in the 70's I had extensive experience with molded and machined very expensive PVDF (fluorocarbon) structures used in laboratory measurement tools. We noticed that these structures migrated slightly over many months, sometimes even cracking!

Thermally retreating the product housings before or after assembly resolved the problem. End users (hospitals, research labs) were advised a DIY in-house corrective procedure. Som I learned that although we knew that softer "Teflons" indeed "cold-flow", even the very hard and supposedly completely inert iterations migrated across time unless the formative stresses were released.

So when I provided a few hundred A'goners cheap all-Teflon power cables, boxes, and DIY Kits years ago I took the trouble to thermally process the raw Cu/Teflon cable to assure no audible break-in from a non-fully cured dielectric. My contenbtion is that the conductive metals used in our audiophilia aren't what require burn-in, but the associated dielectrics. Too bad we couldn't just build devices without ANY insulation, eh?

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