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

I do know that with new speakers for my guitar amps there is most certainly a small breakin period... not hundreds of hours but 10 15ish. I bought a 20 watt Celestion green back and the rough edges in the sound smoothed out pretty quick but definitely changed for the better... all my amps are tube amps and new tubes do break in... pretty quick too. Ive not really noticed it with 12ax7’s but the 6V6’s do need a short time to settle in. Again not hundreds of hours but a few... I leave new power tubes on stand by for a hour or so and we are good... unless they red plate when power hits them... lol. That’s always a good start to your day. When they pop... $$$

This just in!

From the Cable Cooker review somewhere in cyberspace (Enjoy the Music)

“But now that may change. The first rays of a new cable-evaluating dawn are piercing my personal darkness. The audiodharma CABLE COOKER, developed and marketed by the enterprising Alan Kafton at Audio Excellence Az, is designed to maximize the sound quality of power, loudspeaker and interconnect (including A/V and phono) cabling by going far beyond the "normal" break-in that comes from using the cables in a system.

Kafton asserts, for example, that giving an interconnect a single day's burn-in on the CABLE COOKER equals a week or more of continuous system operation. He says that any kind of cable breaks in more thoroughly on a Cooker because of exposure to extreme signal levels and a special waveform that does not occur in normal system operation. The cooker's burn-in circuit supplies >1 watt for interconnects and 22 watts for speaker and power cabling, while generating a dynamic extended-frequency sweep.”

Warm up?  That I can understand.  I leave my electrical equipment on all the time since tolerances change as the temperature does.

The quality of the sound is dependent on how much you paid.  If you take two bottles of wine, one costing $100 and one costing $20, and change the labels, almost everyone will tell you that the new $100 bottle is way superior to the old $100 bottle.  

Explain to me what is changing in electrical equipment “break in”, other than temperature. 

Break in explained! Not for the squeamish.

From Alan Kafton’s web site for his Cable Cooker,

Cable break-in occurs as current flows through the conductors of wiring components. Dielectric stress from voltage differences between conductors also contributes. It takes many hours of in-system use for wiring components to break in, primarily because audio/video signals from normal program material are so low-level.

Consider an interconnect from pre-amplifier to power amplifier. The maximum signal level for full power output of the average power amplifier is 2 volts peak, and the average signal is much less. Typical input impedance of a power amplifier is 10 kohms at the low end for consumer gear; 47 to 100 kohms is typical for a solid-state amplifier, while several hundred kohms impedance is not unusual for a tube power amplifier.

Taking the best-case values from the above, the maximum current seen is 2 Volts/10k ohms, or 200 micro-amperes. This would not be continuous current, because the voltage value is peak, not rms. One can calculate a "use value" from the above equation multiplied by the total time this current flows. Let's call that the Current Time Value (CTV).

Playing an interconnect cable in an audio system for one week (168 hours) of continuous use would expose it to the following CTV: 168 hours x 0.0002 amperes = CTV of 0.0336.

The CABLE COOKER produces signal levels far higher than those seen in normal audio/video system use. The Cooker's sweeping square wave oscillator drives a high-efficiency "H" bridge MOSFET switching circuit. The output signal is a square wave from below 100Hz to above 16 kHz, plus harmonics. Output voltage is 12 volts rms. The measured current flowing through the interconnect is 120 milli-amperes.

Installing an interconnect on the Cooker for one week results in a CTV of 168 hours x 0.12 Amperes = CTV of 20.16. This is a value 600 times greater than under the most ideal audio system conditions. The "stress" on the dielectric is also much higher due to the higher output voltage. Results with the Cooker are typically audible after less than a day.

The same signal also feeds the speaker cable binding posts. The load at the speaker cable inputs draws a continuous 1.88 amperes of current through the wire. With a potential of 12 volts, this is equivalent to a continuous signal level in excess of 22 watts rms. This continuous signal level played through loudspeakers in a home environment would be unbearably loud. Put simply, there is no way for conventional in-system playback burn-in to approach the intensity and efficiency of the Cooker.

Now... please tell me how long it would take to “break in” a guitar signal cord...
< 800 mv is a normal humbucker 

courious to me...