Burn In = Voodoo?

Jim, Megasm gave you the infos I also would have, had he not come first. Its definitely worth a try. The Cable Company is very serious business. Robert Stein is very helpful. I've been dealing with them for over ten years now and never got bad advice. I would do as Sean suggests and send in a duplicate cd to be processed. Pianos, Sopranos I find especially good for testing, also smallish Jazz combos with good soundstaging on the disk.

In the late 70s, before I had ever heard a thing about burn in, I had the following experinece. I got a new solid state amp to try out, a DB Systems DB-6 it was. It sounded okay to me out of the box,but not remarkable in any respect. We had some family over for dinner and were sitting around in the living room afterwards with the stereo playing quietly in the backround. And I remember noticing that I was suddenly hearing an extraordinary amount of detail and resolution from my Quad ESL 57's. What is more, my brother, who was living with us at the time, noticed the same thing. It was a jaw-dropping kind of thing. These kinds of experiences tend to be pretty convincing on a personal level. Although I think we imagine a lot of what we think we hear, I have little doubt that burn in is both real and non-trivial in at least some instances. By the way, it was a few years prior to this that I had a similar personal, "non-suggested" experience with differences between the sound of two stereo receivers. That's what got me on the high-end bus to begin with. I kinda wish it had not happened. :-)

Just my two cents on freezing cables: First, absolute zero is a theoretical temperature at which all atomic activity ceases and is -273 deg C or 0 deg Kelvin. Liquid Nitrogen is -196 deg C, not absolute zero. Liquid Helium comes closest at -272. Second, the better sound is probably for real (though i havent tried it) Reason: the cooler a conductor, the better it conducts. This phenomenon is measured as the temperature gradient of resistance and there are definite values for different materials. Interestingly, superconductor technology follows the same logic - cool it down! The holy grail being, of course, superconductivity at higher temps since cooling to such levels is very expensive. Cheers, Raghu

Thanks for beating me into submission on the absolute zero point. Ths scientist in me does not need more schooling, I forgot the detail for the audience.... hence I did not spell out all of the detail. Agreed with you three that explained absolute zero, the temp of liquid nitrogen and helium, the temp that matters for wire and your points about what absolute really is in relative terms. I am glad there are others that know this kind of stuff... does it really matter to most?????

Of course it has no bearing on anything J_k. You know we're just sitting here waiting for one tinny screw up and BAMM! Got-cha. The only reason it even registered was that your idea was shared on a different post of mine. Same story and I wrote back asking him to please take my post seriously and how could he.... He got me back when a bunch of people jumped on me for my attack. Point was that that post and this one the term Absolute Zero was used. I thought it was a joke in that it's just a unachievable point on a scale. His whole suggestion lost credibility as did yours when the process is not possible. Sorry for jumping, if not me someone else. I hope you understand, I'll just go back into my hole now and hide untill the next victom comes along :-) J.D.