Take it from a sales professional, Brutus: Burn-in isn't a sales tool. In 20 years of selling for a living it's never helped me close one deal, even those involving stereo equipment. On the other hand, both my girl friend and best friend unwittingly critique each system change. Without being prompted or having been told anything was changed they have noticed a difference between new cables and ones that have burned-in, a cold system from one that's been on for a couple of days, etc. When one of them asks "What's new? It sounds different." I know the change isn't my imagination. The friend is a respected electro-mechanical design engineer. We've discussed the concept of burn-in and he says the facts back up its existence. Sorry, can't recite the details as I'm a dummy and don't always capture much more than the essence of what he says. The Cliff Note version, though, says passing a current through a conductor does cause structural change over time, transformers are effected by both temperature and being on for prolonged periods of time and capacitors, in fact electronic equipment in general, do change with use. To be fair, this engineer does feel some claims about burn-in are over hyped. He's recognized subtle changes in my system; it's the grandiose claims of "my system was transformed" that he questions. At least so far... BTW, his *other* degree is in psychology and we've discussed the effects of psychoacoustics, too. End result: It's not all in my head. Components do burn-in.
