Cable Burn In


I'm new here and new to the audiophile world. I recently acquired what seems to be a really high end system that is about 15 years old. Love it. Starting to head down the audiophile rabbit hole I'm afraid.

But, I have to laugh (quietly) at some of what I'm learning and hearing about high fidelity.

The system has really nice cables throughout but I needed another set of RCA cables. I bit the bullet and bought what seems to be a good pair from World's Best Cables. I'm sure they're not the best you can get and don't look as beefy as the Transparent RCA cables that were also with this system. But, no sense bringing a nice system down to save $10 on a set of RCA cables, I guess.

Anyway, in a big white card on the front of the package there was this note: In big red letters "Attention!". Below that "Please Allow 175 hours of Burn-in Time for optimal performance."

I know I'm showing my ignorance but this struck me as funny. I could just see one audiophile showing off his new $15k system to another audiophile and saying "Well, I know it sounds like crap now but its just that my RCA cables aren't burned-in yet. Just come back in 7.29 days and it will sound awesome."
n80
prof
The weird thing is the skeptic is paying the most attention to human fallibility, including his own. The whole critical thinking thing is based on "I’m quite fallible and could be wrong...so how do I come up with ways of accounting for my fallibility?" And yet it is those who have unshakable belief in their own perception, who can not be budged by evidence their perception isn’t as reliable as they think, who are often the ones accusing skeptics of dogmatism.And who end up name-calling and taking pot-shots at the character of the skeptic.

>>>That’s one of the more ridiculous series of claims I’ve seen but one that I suspect actually represents the pseudo skeptic camp rather well. In terms of argument it is really illogical, however. Of course any of us can be sometimes be deceived or fail to hear differences but that doesn’t mean we are ALWAYS deceived or mistaken. Nobody claimed it was easy. That’s part of the problem, think8ng that it’s easy. People try something once and draw a conclusion and give up.

Nobody is saying psychological biases cannot play a role sometimes. But to suggest audiophiles suffer self deception and psychological bias in all cases is laughable. If that were true we’d never progress beyond common generic sound. I can appreciate the argument that folks take pot shots at the character of some skeptics. But logically that does not (rpt not) mean that the skeptics are correct. Follow?

Human fallibility indeed.😛


Thanks everyone for the education on cables and burn-in. I feel like I now know what I need to know as it applies to my needs.
ieales
Cable direction, other than cables with networks, is nonsense.
Cable burn-in is most probably 100% nonsense.

>>>You sound awfully sure of yourself. Are those conclusions based on experience, physics, what other pseudo skeptics told you, a Google search, your gut reaction? Finally, do you have ANY evidence to support either of those statements? Share, share....
@n80  I'm not sure what you might have learned from this thread except that there are those who do believe in cable burn-in and those who don't.  I can't see how it hurts you to be open to it.  If you hear no difference after time passes, you've lost nothing.  If you do perceive an improvement in the openness of your sound then yippee!  

One last thought.  In the end, the issue is informed by your world view.  If you believe that every phenomenon we experience in life is quantifiable then the intangibles will never matter to you.  In my case, I've experienced too many phenomena that I would have no scientific explanation for to believe that there are not things happening in highly resolving audio systems that is beyond our ability to quantify.

Enjoy the journey!


hifiman5 said:

"  I can't see how it hurts you to be open to it. "

All I said was that I feel like I know what I need to know as it applies to my needs. That doesn't really fall on one side or other of the issue.

It seems like everyone wants this to be an all-or-nothing issue. I don't see why. I can comfortably say that some smart people here feel like burn-in is a significant issue but that for my purposes and situation is unlikely to have any impact on my listening pleasure. And as I said before, I'm going to plug them in and listen to them, and again, what else would I do with them? And again, the odds of me (a beginner) hearing this difference over the days it takes to change the SQ are slim.

The only other option would be for me to buy cables that were burned-in at the factory and that is simply money I'm not going to spend regardless of the potential perceived SQ improvement. It just would not make sense at this point in my dabbling in this hobby.

hifiman5 also said:

" One last thought.  In the end, the issue is informed by your world view.  If you believe that every phenomenon we experience in life is quantifiable then the intangibles will never matter to you. "

Again, I think this implies that your world view requires you to be on an extreme end of every issue. Don't get me wrong, I am not a relativist by a long long shot. And I firmly believe in elements of experience and reality that transcend the empirical. But certainly there are experiences that are easily tangible and quantifiable and there are experiences that are not. My world view does not require me to put all experiences in one box.