How much does volume matter when breaking in amps and cables?

Cable break-in is primarily about the dielectric and you need to run a significant fraction of the insulation’s breakdown voltage to do a "true" burn-in.

So yes, running higher volume through your speaker cables will accelerate your break-in ... domestic issues notwithstanding ;-)

This is one sad reality of tonearm cables - that you’re running a fraction of a microvolt through them. For this reason, we burn-in the arm cables of tonearms before delivering them to our customers.

The less dielectric, the easier/quicker the burn-in, to the point where I’ve observed a total burn-in time of about 30 minutes for our litz interconnects with their cotton jackets.

On the other hand, a thick Teflon jacketed cable could take 400-500 hours.

Interestingly, I’ve found that there’s no relationship between the capacitance of the cable and break-in time.

Teflon for example, has lower capacitance than PVC, and yet PVC reaches its "final" state much more quickly.

Which cable/material you’ll prefer is up to you and your system as I’m just talking about burn-in time.

Thom @ Galibier Design

@ geoffkait15 said:

Isn’t it pretty to think so? Look, even IF one manufacturer comes to the show with a completely broken-in component, a speaker or amp or whatever, which they actually don’t because they want to show their latest model, and one that’s not all banged up, they cannot necessarily control who else they exhibit with, you know, the guy who provides cables, the guy who brings the Turntable, the guy who brings the CD player, power cord, etc. They aren’t that coordinated, trust me. The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.

@aberyclark replied:

True. What you are hearing is not break in. Maybe tweaking as the show goes on, crowds, changing speaker positioning, your ears adjusting to the environment etc.

I can’t begin to tell you the coordination problems I’ve had with gear coming in from all sections of the country - mating up for the first time during setup day at a show. This doesn’t even take into account the lack of preparedness of some partnering exhibitors.

Sure, minor to major tweaking occurs during the course of a three day show, but at shows where we "nailed" it from the onset (with only minor tweaking throughout), things got better and better - right up until we were ready for teardown on Sunday afternoon.

I advise show goers to visit their "shortlist rooms" on Sunday mornings for this reason. It tends to be quiet and the gear has had some 72 hours to settle in.

Audio gear takes a terrible beating when being transported to a show, and for vacuum tube gear which doesn’t require 4 days’ warm-up (this has been my experience with some s-s amps as well), multiple power cycles over a few days help to relieve the mechanical stress that have built up over the course of the gear’s journey to a show.

Yes to earplugs during plane travel ;-)

... Thom @ Galibier Design