cable burn-in / system burn-in

Louis you lost me on this fade out thing. For me bottom line is that when I have a system that is taken down turned off, cables and equipment moved, then once the system is re-assembled it takes time for the system sound to come together and play to its potential. That just happened here. If I add new gear, break-in / burn-in (call it what you want) is needed. With equipment that does not need break in then the equipment and cables need to "settle in" before the sound comes together. For me I look at settling-in in the shorter term of time, break-in depending on the equipment involved can take hundreds of hours. The accompanying change in sound is very real and I use bass and its ability to go from lean and thin to pressurizing a room as a palpable example of one of the possible affects of settling in, break-in or burn-in. In my post above, I use bass pressure in a room as a "palpable" example. Bass pressurizing a room gets outside the realm of the more subjective perceptions audiophiles talk about like "imaging," and "soundstage depth."

Foster_9 wrote:

Louis you lost me on this fade out thing. For me bottom line is that when I have a system that is taken down turned off, cables and equipment moved, then once the system is re-assembled it takes time for the system sound to come together and play to its potential.

This is "settling in." This is not burn-in.

For me I look at settling-in in the shorter term of time, break-in depending on the equipment involved can take hundreds of hours. The accompanying change in sound is very real[...]

I agree. Settling-in is something that happens in about three days.

If you compare "settling in" to what people call "burning in," I believe it is best to understand it in terms of numbers.

On a scale of 1 to 100 in terms of sound quality attained, let's say settling in (the thing that happens in about three days) is 1.

On this scale, burning-in with a specially engineered signal to accomplish this is 100.

In other words, "burning in" is something that can revolutionize and alter the sound substantially, whereas "settling in" is just something that adds a little homogeneity to the sound.

Burning in can trick you into thinking it is a different component.

Settling in can't.

I'm currently running new exciting experiments with this phenomenon. Will publish results when they're ripe.

Highly interesting! I would say revolutionary.

Louis Motek

Foster_9 wrote:

Louis you lost me on this fade out thing. For me bottom line is that when I have a system that is taken down turned off, cables and equipment moved, then once the system is re-assembled it takes time for the system sound to come together and play to its potential.

This is "settling in." This is not burn-in.
07-18-09: Lesslossliudasm

Louis, I never said this was "burn-in." In my post I differentiated between settling-in and break-in / burn-in. I know the difference.

Sorry for any misunderstanding. I just wanted to differentiate and arrive at some definitions.

It would be nice if people could voice anything else yet unsaid about the phenomenon of cable burn-in.

Louis Motek

Any interconnect or cable will have as a component of it's construction, a dielectric. Cables/wires will also have a measurable capacitance, for a given length(they act, to a degree, as a capacitor). Other than a vacuum(the best dielectric) and air, all dielectrics will store a certain amount of energy and release it at various rates and time constants, that are predictable to a point(http://www.designers-guide.org/Modeling/da.pdf). The better cable designers take this into account, and voice their cables accordingly(the "Q" of a cable can be predicted). Once a cable or capacitor's dielectric has "charged"(so to speak), it stabilizes and reaches the target sound of the designer. That's a big PART of why the better equipment and cable builders inform the customer that their gear will take such and such a length of time to sound their best. The better dielectrics(ie: polypropylene, polystyrene, Teflon) absorb and release less energy, and do it more slowly- thus, they "sound" better when used in caps and as insulators. They also take more time to burn-in. In a highly resolving sound system, anything that's released into the audio signal, outside of the intended musical content, will be noticed as distortion, noise, a frequency or time aberration, by anyone with ears. Then there are those that don't want to, or can't hear...........