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Poor man's IC cooker?

I'm in the process of testing a number of new ICs for my preamp to amp link, and was debating what to do about burning them in. I want to get a quick turnaround on the burn in so I can spend more of the 30 day trial period offered by the manufacturers listening and comparing.

Since my peamp has dual outs I figured I could use one set as a burn point, letting me listen to the other output while cables are cooking on the first. So what I did was go to Ratshack and buy their 4 jack RCA phono board (274-322). I soldered 100KOhm 1/2W dummy loads to each of the outer jacks. I plug the cables from the preamp to the loads and have a nice stable load for burn in. I decided to use my FM tuner as a source. I have a Yamaha T-2, which allows me to tune so that I get a combination of FM white noise and some signal from a selected station. I set the preamp to half volume and let it go. My only concern is whether that's a good signal mix for burn in.

I figure 3-4 days of this and each pair of ICs will be burned in pretty well. And I can do it 24 hours a day without keeping myself awake. Does this sound like a decent plan?

I will, of course, run the cables with actual music for at least a couple of hours when they get inserted for listening.
tonyptony

Showing 1 response by serus

serus
93 posts
 
Combine all the concepts for the "best" cable cooker.
Buy a used receiver, and if you find one for $1.88 that's great... Tune to FM noise between stations and defeat the mute. You have those connectors from radio shack. Connect one side to the speaker-out!
The other side is the load. Get power resistors - 8.2 ohm 25W units. These should work well with most small receivers.
Connect the cables between the receiver and the load and slowly increase volume. You stop when the resistors get way too hot... Give them a few minutes at each step before you increase the volume level.
For a safety factor you may add a small fan to cool the resistors and the receiver. Most receivers are not rated to work at 100% duty cycle close to full power!
Cook cables for at least 6 hours. Some cables with heavy dielectric may need more than 24 hours even on this kind of a cooker.
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