How do you perform a burn in on a tonearm cable?

I'm burning in my new tonearm cable right now, I just made up a custom wire rig to do the job better and faster.

Bought a cheap Radio Shack RCA/RCA and cut off one end. Stripped the conductors to reveal hot and ground. Soldered hots and grounds to a male 5 pin DIN and plugged it into the female DIN (to RCA) of my new phono cable.

Hook Shack RCA to source such as FM tuner or CD player and the RCA's on your new tonearm cable to a high level input on your preamp. Turn on your tuner or CD player on repeat and let it burn.

To be sure you're OK, you can listen "through" the tonearm cable and shack wire to verify signal is passing through both channels.

If you need to break in head shell to preamp, solder alligator clips on the stripped Shack cable (instead of male DIN), plug Shack RCA's into tuner or CD as above and clip alligators on head shell leads (Keep away from cartridge!).

First description burns new cable only. Second method burns head shell leads, internal wire in tonearm and tone arm cable to preamp.

Good news, cuts hundreds of hours off of spinning LP's to get wires broken in and the FM or CD source is over one volt, many times the output of phono cartridges. Many moving coils are as low as .1 to .5 MV, meaning they never push enough voltage through your new wire to settle it.

Or, you could just play music and let it burn-in in due course. I mean, how bad can it sound right out of the box??

play records

I hook mine up to my CD player and my pre amp and leave my system on 24/7 until the cables have aprox 300 hours on them. That said I ordered my current phono cable from my dealer with instructions to the manufacturer to burn them at the factory. They came with 300 hrs burn in on an industrial strength cable cooker. After that I only ran them on my CD player for 48 hours and they were done.

Just play music.

The difference between a new cable and one that is broken in, is subtle not night and day.

Your mood, emotion, state of mind, health, etc. are far bigger influences from listening session to listening session.

You could also seek out Alan Kafton's "Cable Cooker" or someone with that device-I'm sure that one has the ability to burn in phono cables. Other alternatives might be (not sure whether they have the capability to deal with a mini-din phono) the Nordost cable burner or Jim Hagermans Fry Cleaner.

As Albert has pointed out, the low level signal from most phono cartridges (and particularly low output MC's) is, in many people's opinions not enough to ever fully burn in the phono cable. That, combined with something like cryoing the cable (I recently bought a new cryoed phono cable from Gene at Take Five Audio who offers the added value service of burning the cable in on the cable cooker which is a superb service as far as I'm concerned) makes burn in of the phono cable even more important.

My Stealth Hyperphono cable is not suggested by the manufacturer to be broken in with a high level signal due to it's design. My cart is .5mv output.

WHat I have done in the past to break in phono stages is is that I made a reverse RIAA signal of white noise (and some music as a test that the levels are correct) I play this in quicktime or another player and set it to loop. I lower the output of the computer to very low, and also the output of the quickime player to very low. Between these 2 volume adjustments I can get the very low signal that mimics the output of a cart. I use the music track to make sure I am not overloading the phono stage.

I should probably try this combined with Alberts suggestion about making the din to RCA cable then I could set a slightly hotter signal that the cart would be outputting - maybe double .

If anyone needs the inverse RIAA files I have them in both mp3 and aif formats. email me.

Bake at 450 for 35-45 minutes should do the trick.

Send it to me and I will burn it in on my Audioharma CC.

Bake at 450 for 35-45 minutes should do the trick.

Leave them in for an extra 10 minutes if you like them "well done."

I did this recently with my OL Silver mkii tonearm. See the 6moons article below for a diagram (scroll down to the bottom). In my case I just used some radio shack jumper cables and connected them between my receivers L/R preouts ICs and the tonearm wire clips. I then connected the tonearm RCAs into a line level input on my preamp. Finally, I just played cable radio station music via my reciever through the tonearm cable until I felt it was toasted enough. It worked like a charm!

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/originlive/silver_2.html

Listening Impressions Round 2 – Using a CD Player Output to Burn In the Tonearm Cable
Origin Live says “Origin Live arms take a very long time to burn in their cables and do not sound anything like the final performance when first used. To speed up this process we offer the ‘burn in cable’ which speeds up the process enormously.” Origin Live recommends that you burn in the tonearm cable using the output of your CD player and the supplied burn-in cable for a minimum of 24 hours. Essentially you turn the tonearm cable into a high-level interconnect with voltage passing through it from the CD players output that is thousands of times greater than it will ever see from any phono cartridge.

You fellow members that do not believe in burning cables with a CC need to try it first and then pass judgement.

The "bake at 450" etc.. is old and worn out. So is "just play music". Real deep!

Any members that have tried the Audioharma CC with their cables and found it to be trash? Please let us hear from you.

http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/search.mpl?searchtext=silver+%2Bburn+%2Bin&b=AND&topic=&topics_only=N&author=+john+curl&date1=&date2=&slowmessage=&sort=score&sortOrder=DESC&forum=cables

Read what this says about siver cable burn in.
I think John Curl knows what he is talking about.

Tim