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."
In another forum this could be a debate about the existence of Bigfoot. The UFO phenomena. Ghosts. Religion. What ever people have beliefs in. The human senses are quite extraordinary. Digital photography has yet to capture the resolution that the eye can see with our 20/20 vision. The human ear is limited to 20-20 at best. I do believe there are parameters our scientific instruments cannot measure in the sonic realm. Its not cut and dry. To be fair a human is not infallable. We cannot be calibrated like an instrument. However with that being said the cable burn-in phenomena is real. Too many people have experienced just to dismiss It. Quick AB test are inaccurate. You have to listen for long periods at a time to pick out differences. Cable burn-in can't be scientifically proven with our primitive instruments. They are the best we have with our current technology. Coming full circle it goes back to our beliefs. Do you believe we have discovered everything? All the physics of electrical current. If you think we have its your opinion. This debate won't be settled anytime soon. I'm getting sleepy. Carry on.
Blueranger The human ear is limited to 20-20 at best. I do believe there are parameters our scientific instruments cannot measure in the sonic realm. Its not cut and dry. To be fair a human is not infallable. We cannot be calibrated like an instrument. However with that being said the cable burn-in phenomena is real. Too many people have experienced just to dismiss It. Quick AB test are inaccurate. You have to listen for long periods at a time to pick out differences.
>>>>The ear is limited but the human brain is not. The human brain itself is sensitive to interference and noise from a variety of sources that affect our hearing, e.g., RFI/EMI and subtle conscious and subconscious influences of our physical surroundings and emotional and mental state. News flash! Our perception of sound is not (rpt not) completely based on what goes into the ears. We can be easily distracted, even consciously. For example if someone is conversing with us we may not hear the sound at all, or only as background, I.e., phase lock loop effect.
You hit the nail on the head. Ears are like the microphones and our brains are like the tape recorders in the studio. Oh well maybe not a good analogy. Steve Guttenberg in on of his youtube videos predicts that in the future we won't be listening to music by our ears but the music will be fed directly into our brains for ultimate fidelity!!
blueranger You hit the nail on the head. Ears are like the microphones and our brains are like the tape recorders in the studio. Oh well maybe not a good analogy. Steve Guttenberg in on of his youtube videos predicts that in the future we won’t be listening to music by our ears but the music will be fed directly into our brains for ultimate fidelity!!
>>>>If you don’t think it’s a good analogy why did you say it? Microphones and recorders, well, quite. Ears are like microphones and brains are like transceivers. And the transceivers work on the conscious level and the subconscious level. Much of the noise and distortion you’re perceiving (hearing) is not from the recording or anything in the system. It’s still S/N + D. You can’t tell the difference, whether the N or D is from the system or outside the system. The brain doesn’t differentiate. I’m from Guttenberg’s future.
No one can keep track of it that well. Things change all the time, even things that you can’t control and things you don’t even know about. Nobody’s going to sit there for days on end and see when the break in stops, Cut me some slack, Jack!
First, cables are just more than
resistance. It has inductance and capacitance as well. But that is
not the whole story. The inductance and capacitance are distributive so
the rated inductance per foot or capacitance per foot don't tell the whole
story either. Also the inductance and capacitance is frequency dependent
so it gets even more complicated. Not only that inductance and
capacitance are current and voltage dependent so it gets even more more complicated.
Now it's not just the metal.
It's the dielectric material which are also current, voltage, freq. dependent.
So you can see. Hopefully you
can see.
Now as for the measurement, how can
you measure the effect of burn-in?
It can be measured but it's not that
simple and you need some pretty sensitive equipment. Some stuffs from Fry’s is not enough. Not only that you need a fairly complicated
setup to capture things in time domain and you need some serious fourier
transform software to analyze the data.
Now you want to know how a cable burn-in? Just run some 20A current through some tiny wire and see if it burns.
The scientific method allows changing only one variable at a time.
So all the CBI fans listen in climate controlled inert environments, always eat the identical menu, always get 8.5 hours of sleep, listen at precisely the same time and the same level, stop electronic and speaker aging, have their own power generation... ALL systems are a collection constantly changing variables.
CBI is about the MOST Unscientific topic in audio.
So all the CBI fans listen in climate controlled inert environments,
always eat the identical menu, always get 8.5 hours of sleep, listen at
precisely the same time and the same level, stop electronic and speaker
aging, have their own power generation...
That's the logical fallacy of the "excluded middle." You might want to look it up.
Sorry that I don't have the time nor bandwith to argue the old stuff re expectation bias, blind studies, anecdotal experience. I CAN tell you that in the 70's I had extensive experience with molded and machined very expensive PVDF (fluorocarbon) structures used in laboratory measurement tools. We noticed that these structures migrated slightly over many months, sometimes even cracking!
Thermally retreating the product housings before or after assembly resolved the problem. End users (hospitals, research labs) were advised a DIY in-house corrective procedure. Som I learned that although we knew that softer "Teflons" indeed "cold-flow", even the very hard and supposedly completely inert iterations migrated across time unless the formative stresses were released.
So when I provided a few hundred A'goners cheap all-Teflon power cables, boxes, and DIY Kits years ago I took the trouble to thermally process the raw Cu/Teflon cable to assure no audible break-in from a non-fully cured dielectric. My contenbtion is that the conductive metals used in our audiophilia aren't what require burn-in, but the associated dielectrics. Too bad we couldn't just build devices without ANY insulation, eh?
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