Do speaker cables need a burn in period?

@atdavid...just wanted to say that I have enjoyed reading your post. Welcome aboard.

Many dealers offer these services as well. Not much here to argue about really.

I am glad you agree with me. It proves nobody is doing it for free because it costs actual money. I doubt anyone who bought a pair of interconnect from Morrow that cost 80 dollars a pair would pay $30 for burn in, and to be honest, it probably makes no difference if it’s a 80 dollar interconnect. Now on the other hands, Morrow is selling a $5000 dollars interconnect, then sure $30 dollar of burn in fee is perfectly reasonable.

Imagine if you’re QED selling a pair of interconnect for $100 dollar per pair, $30 dollars of burn in cost will go real well I suppose :-)

Im not sure that it proves nobody is doing it for free as I have not done any research on this but my first google search turned up this:

https://www.futureshop.co.uk/free-cable-burn-in

I’m sure there are others. You have peaked my curiosity however so next time I speak with Mike I’m going to ask him how many people buying his lower priced cables purchase the burn in service. The answer might be surprising.

"Free" is not free. They already took into account the cost and added to the overall cost. Like I said, it costs money to perform cable burn in. I suspect if they have only one Nordost Vidar Machine. I doubt they can burn in too many cables and it appears like a marketing ploy so that they can claim they provide burn in service. To fully burn in a cable, it may take up to 300hr. How many cables do you think they can burn in using one Nordost Vidar Machine? Simple math really.

Now they can purchase more burn in machine but I don’t think nobody will give them the machine for free.  Looking at their website, they sell hundreds of brands of cable.  Hm.... how many of that can be burned-in?  My guess they can only offer burn in if the cables cost north of $7K lols.

Our cable burn-in service is a non-chargeable service and is provided by Future Shop at its discretion. We will attempt to fulfill all burn-in requests for the specified time periods. However, during extremely busy periods, we regret we may not be able to meet the demand for all requests due to the limited connections available on the Nordost Vidar cable conditioning machines.

Like I said before, just a quick look around would dispel any questions:
https://forum.audiogon.com/search/index?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=cable+burn+in+services

There's more as well using other search parameters.

All the best,
Nonoise