Cable break-in is primarily about the dielectric and you need to run a significant fraction of the insulation’s breakdown voltage to do a "true" burn-in.
So yes, running higher volume through your speaker cables will accelerate your break-in ... domestic issues notwithstanding ;-)
This is one sad reality of tonearm cables - that you’re running a fraction of a microvolt through them. For this reason, we burn-in the arm cables of tonearms before delivering them to our customers.
The less dielectric, the easier/quicker the burn-in, to the point where I’ve observed a total burn-in time of about 30 minutes for our litz interconnects with their cotton jackets.
On the other hand, a thick Teflon jacketed cable could take 400-500 hours.
Interestingly, I’ve found that there’s no relationship between the capacitance of the cable and break-in time.
Teflon for example, has lower capacitance than PVC, and yet PVC reaches its "final" state much more quickly.
Which cable/material you’ll prefer is up to you and your system as I’m just talking about burn-in time.
Thom @ Galibier Design
