How much does volume matter when breaking in amps and cables?

It doesn’t matter at all, as breaking in cables and amplifiers is a myth invented to reduce returns  

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

Thus spoke Zarathu.

Break-in! If it ain't mechanical, it don't need no freakin' break-in!

Since there is SO MUCH misinformation in this thread, I am going to add to what I’ve said above:

First, I have to ask where did "reducing the amount of returns" come into play with "break-in"?

What kind of garage made stuff and low tier dealers are you people buying from and dealing with to think that break-in has to do with returns? Real manufacturers stand behind their products! As I stated earlier, if you run our equipment for 12.5 days straight and can’t tell if you like it by then, we give our dealers 30 days to return it.

So for those of you thinking it has to do with returns, you’re just simply wrong and my suggestion is to purchase things from dealers who stand behind what they sell as they should be selling brands that stand behind what they build.

Good dealers who sell good brands will tell you about the break-in period because good manufacturers know how much time that takes and are telling them so they can set that level of expectation for you.