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.