Burn In = Voodoo?

Hi Sean & Detlof... would you please give us more info regarding "disc cutters". Thanks, Jim.

Jim, call Cable Co about Audio Desk CD edge bevel machine.
They sell a special package of Audio Desk and Furutech RD-1 demagnitizer at reduced package price. If you buy duplicate
CDs you can send one to them and they will bevel & demag one
for you to compare. This is a fairly expensive tweak.

A word of caution, I will not use this even if it "seems" to
work now because it violates my golden rule about CD Tweaks:
NEVER APPLY A TWEAK THAT CAN'T BE REMOVED! Here is link to
Cable Co special for Audio Desk: www.fatwyre.com/newspecials.html

Jim, Megasm gave you the infos I also would have, had he not come first. Its definitely worth a try. The Cable Company is very serious business. Robert Stein is very helpful. I've been dealing with them for over ten years now and never got bad advice. I would do as Sean suggests and send in a duplicate cd to be processed. Pianos, Sopranos I find especially good for testing, also smallish Jazz combos with good soundstaging on the disk.

In the late 70s, before I had ever heard a thing about burn in, I had the following experinece. I got a new solid state amp to try out, a DB Systems DB-6 it was. It sounded okay to me out of the box,but not remarkable in any respect. We had some family over for dinner and were sitting around in the living room afterwards with the stereo playing quietly in the backround. And I remember noticing that I was suddenly hearing an extraordinary amount of detail and resolution from my Quad ESL 57's. What is more, my brother, who was living with us at the time, noticed the same thing. It was a jaw-dropping kind of thing. These kinds of experiences tend to be pretty convincing on a personal level. Although I think we imagine a lot of what we think we hear, I have little doubt that burn in is both real and non-trivial in at least some instances. By the way, it was a few years prior to this that I had a similar personal, "non-suggested" experience with differences between the sound of two stereo receivers. That's what got me on the high-end bus to begin with. I kinda wish it had not happened. :-)

Just my two cents on freezing cables: First, absolute zero is a theoretical temperature at which all atomic activity ceases and is -273 deg C or 0 deg Kelvin. Liquid Nitrogen is -196 deg C, not absolute zero. Liquid Helium comes closest at -272. Second, the better sound is probably for real (though i havent tried it) Reason: the cooler a conductor, the better it conducts. This phenomenon is measured as the temperature gradient of resistance and there are definite values for different materials. Interestingly, superconductor technology follows the same logic - cool it down! The holy grail being, of course, superconductivity at higher temps since cooling to such levels is very expensive. Cheers, Raghu