How do you perform a burn in on a tonearm cable?

I'm burning in my new tonearm cable right now, I just made up a custom wire rig to do the job better and faster.

Bought a cheap Radio Shack RCA/RCA and cut off one end. Stripped the conductors to reveal hot and ground. Soldered hots and grounds to a male 5 pin DIN and plugged it into the female DIN (to RCA) of my new phono cable.

Hook Shack RCA to source such as FM tuner or CD player and the RCA's on your new tonearm cable to a high level input on your preamp. Turn on your tuner or CD player on repeat and let it burn.

To be sure you're OK, you can listen "through" the tonearm cable and shack wire to verify signal is passing through both channels.

If you need to break in head shell to preamp, solder alligator clips on the stripped Shack cable (instead of male DIN), plug Shack RCA's into tuner or CD as above and clip alligators on head shell leads (Keep away from cartridge!).

First description burns new cable only. Second method burns head shell leads, internal wire in tonearm and tone arm cable to preamp.

Good news, cuts hundreds of hours off of spinning LP's to get wires broken in and the FM or CD source is over one volt, many times the output of phono cartridges. Many moving coils are as low as .1 to .5 MV, meaning they never push enough voltage through your new wire to settle it.

Or, you could just play music and let it burn-in in due course. I mean, how bad can it sound right out of the box??

play records

You could also seek out Alan Kafton's "Cable Cooker" or someone with that device-I'm sure that one has the ability to burn in phono cables. Other alternatives might be (not sure whether they have the capability to deal with a mini-din phono) the Nordost cable burner or Jim Hagermans Fry Cleaner.

As Albert has pointed out, the low level signal from most phono cartridges (and particularly low output MC's) is, in many people's opinions not enough to ever fully burn in the phono cable. That, combined with something like cryoing the cable (I recently bought a new cryoed phono cable from Gene at Take Five Audio who offers the added value service of burning the cable in on the cable cooker which is a superb service as far as I'm concerned) makes burn in of the phono cable even more important.

Just play music.

The difference between a new cable and one that is broken in, is subtle not night and day.

Your mood, emotion, state of mind, health, etc. are far bigger influences from listening session to listening session.