For Your Edification and Enjoyment re "Burn In", etc.

Cartridges and caps (Mundorf anyone?) are the devices most obviously in need of breaking in, the same does though apply to cables (cooker, anyone?), tubes and loudspeakers. To deny it is at a minimum peculiar. Equating breaking in and tweaks is semantically aberrant and factually wrong.

So what about Caps, cartridges, valves or speakers. Are you still maintaining they sound right straight out of the box?

@douglas_schroeder 

Hmmm, I can only comment from admittedly limited experience. I have upgraded from a well run-in Antelope Audio Zodiac Gold to a Zodiac Platinum. For the first 500(!) hours I thought I had made a mistake until literally all of a sudden the fog cleared and I had substantially enhanced micro-detail, soundstage width and depth as well as significantly improved impulse performance.

In a similar vain, I replaced JAN Philips 7581a tubes with NOS cryo‘ed Svetlana Winged-C 6L6GCs in my Wavac EC 300b amp.
The goal was to eliminate a slightly forward, discant emphasising sound. What I got for the first 50 hours was numb, incongruous sound and I was ready to give up. All of a sudden though, holographic soundstage, sweet but intense violin sound and an overall organic presentation that I was looking for.

In summary: while I agree that for basic ‘good-better’ comparisons, burn-in can be largely ignored, for real fine tuning it is essential to account for it.

I find the arrogance in declaring what I hear to be nonsense quite objectionable. One of the problems with so-called experts is that they tend to end up believing their own blasé utterances. In this particular case, I happen to think he is on hopeless ground arguing that you should compare things straight out of the box. That is so patently non-sensical that it actually doesn’t warrant any objecting argument.

Enjoy the music

@douglas_schroeder 

I suggest you review the absoluteness of your statements on burn in on this thread alone; maybe my comment will look a little less off topic, then. 

I guess you for obvious reasons don‘t want to answer my question

May the Technicolor fart be deemed to be lightning: it’ll add to the amazement about the origin! (scientific, that)

Show me what technical apparatus Stradivarius used in building violins other than his ears and we might be getting somewhere on this....Acoustics is a multidimensional, inexact science, that’s why concert halls are built by masters using lots of technology AND their ears. Any half decent sound engineer will tell you the same.