Cable run in burn in time

Audio stores make 80% of their profits on expensive
wires and cables. Be EXTREMELY skeptical about anything
anyone tells you about wires and cables. Ask to hear
the science behind it. If the answer sounds fishy,
don't give them your money. My advice is to avoid being
one of these guys or gals with $1,000 worth of wire and
cable in a $3,000 set up. Use every last cent to buy
the best speakers you can and then work backwards. In
the beginning, there is absolutely nothing wrong with
using 12 AWG 99.999% OFC speaker wire that you can get
for about 50 cents per foot. You will see a much bigger
bang for your buck with improved speakers than you will
with expensive wires and cable. Ask yourself why cables
need to "burn in." Let me guess -- the guy is also trying
to sell you a "cable cooker."

Cable burn-in is all about the insulation part and not the wire itself. The insulation absorbs energy from the conductor when a current like music is flowing.This absorption causes the insulation's molecules to re-arrange from random into uniform state, and when done the insulation will absorb less energy and so cable will be broken-in, giving less distortion. To remain broken-in the cable must stay connected to the hardware which must remain powered. Where no signal is present the molecules return to random and the process has to be restarted. So you see it is a complete waste of money paying out thousands of $$ on hi-fi equipment because you never get to hear it at anything like its full potential unless you are willing to be charged and locked away for causing global warming!

Disregard the salesman. As a side note, oxidation occurs between connections that are not moved and / or re-seated over extended periods of time. As such, it is a good idea to carefully pull plugs / break connections and re-seat them occassionally. Sean
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I agree with Jayceem about the dielectrics. I do know in the case of capacitors that once they are formed-up they stay that way. I replaced some Solen caps with Hovlands once and when new they were bright and hard. After about 200 hours they smoothed out. I pop this preamp (Sonic Frontiers) in my system on occasion and it sounds fine every time.

I am now becoming suspect about cable cookers. On some cables my Audiodharma cooker makes the cables sound worse (Pure Note) on just 24 hours cook time. These cables were perfect before I re-cooked after I had my Siltechs in my system for several months. I called Pure Note and they said do not cook (they no longer use the Audiodharma). Pure Note says they have learned with their 7 nines wire that the cooker will temporarily alter the wire (makes it sound thinner) until you put several hundred system hours on them again. I believe AudioEngr (Empirical Audio) had the same findings so cooking may be a bad idea with some cables.

several decades by which time your hearing will have changed and all you will hear is the stereo subwoofers in your system any way.

On the Audiodharma, the load resistance is far lower than it should be for interconnects. This can cause a far higher level of current to pass through them than they would ever see in any given audio based circuit. If the sonics are being "damaged" by the Audiodharma, that would be my guess as to why it is taking place. As such, changing the load resistance should not be a big deal and would correct the problem for future use. I don't know if Alan has corrected this in the current production models, but if he hasn't, he needs to.

As i've said before, not all cable cookers are created equal. My personal thoughts were that the Duo-Tech was a piece of scrap. Maybe there are more "pieces of scrap" burners than there are good ones. Sean
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I'd tend to agree. As cable burn-in as about settling the dielectrics to their eventual extinction state (if you will), using an electronic device that may indeed damage them by overheating the active conductors is not a good idea. I'm fortunate that the dielectrics in my DIY PC Kits are simply Teflons, for which I successfully use a non-electrical burn-in processing. For fluorocarbons I had discovered back in the late 70s that the molding, tooling and extruding manufacturing process would result in a finished product state that still had mechanical stress potentials that would resolve ("cure") only over a VERY long period of time (months to at least one year). As the products manufactured were high-performance volumetric-measurement handtools (Pipetman, et al), it was mighty important to stabilize their structures before calibration so that they'd stay stable for their intended multi-year lives. My thinking is that since this same stabilization process (I'm calling it Enhanced Stabilization Technique for lack of a more inventive term) very measurably "settles" fluorocarbon products dimensionally, then there's quite apt to be an auditory correlate, since our ear-brains are far more sensitive than our labs' micrometers. So my take is that a "burn-in" process should get you where you're going eventually, and NOT provide an errant detour via an accidental over-processing, perhaps even ruining the performance of the product, as mentioned above. Users claim that my lowly $39 DIY PCs sound great right out of the box, and I suspect simply will change only VERY slightly with mechanical settling in over time...WITHOUT electro/mechanical machinatiing. Too bad this EST doesn't work on most cheaper dielectrics. Sigh....

Beware of over cooking your cables, I think that after you have approx. 200 hours on your cables they are 90% broke in and that last bit will come in time. I also notice when cables are disconnected the sound is some what thin or less dynamic and takes around 24 hours to settle back in! I notice this with PC more than IC.
I also notice that if you clean connectors every time there disconnected the resettling in takes less time!
This has been my findings in my system.
Happy Listening!

A rebuttal from the man who makes the cable cooker as posted on the Cable Asylum:

http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/cables/messages/75312.html