Cable Burn In

Whenever i'm bored (it's raining and i can't fish and my wife's sleeping so i can't play the music) i enjoy reading this forum.  Yes, many of the posters are predictable but also make legitimate arguments.  What i believe is that music is almost a purely emotional experience and, therefore, it's impossible to argue with someone who says they hear something, even though it can't be measured--it might not be their ears that are "hearing" it.  Could be just an emotional response. After all we can't measure love but we are reasonably certain it exists because we "feel" it.  That said i choose to fall in the measuring camp when it comes to high end audio claims and i may tend to disbelieve if it can't be measured.  What i also wonder from N80's original post is what would motivate the manufacturer to state the break-in period and how did they know it was 175 hours?  Why not 25 hours or even 750 hours?  It's a legitimate question to ask them how they determined it.  Is it possible their motive is to add further scientific-sounding goop in order to make us believe even more strongly that the cables are really going to make a difference? Or does it leave them an "out" to say we didn't break them in properly if we don't hear a difference ?  And if i don't play my system for a few months (as happens when we come to the lake for summer) do the dielectric molecules drift back into a random orientation or are they permanently "aligned" after break-in?  It all sounds like snake oil to me but the fun part of being an audiophile is that chasing perfect sound is never-ending and we're free to believe, feel and hear what we want--and nobody's going to change Geoff"s mind regardless of the merit and logic of their arguments because he says he "hears" it or "feels" it and we can't tell him it's all in his imagination.  If he imagines he sees ghosts then he does!  Thanks to N80, Prof, jea48, Shadorne and Geoff for furnishing high-end education, argument and entertainment on a rainy day.  Luckily i'm a long, long way from a high end audio store...

aalenik.

And one you get guys like Prof & Clearthink going, forget a logical straightforward conversation.

If you are implying my posts are "illogical" I haven't seen you demonstrate that.  (Unless I'm misunderstanding what you meant there).

One last point; the notion of burn-in as a marketing ploy is nonsense. In 40+ years of this hobby (obsession?), I’ve never heard a dealer or mfgr. tell any dissatisfied customer to "wait for burn-in"

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If the "burn in" claim has not been used to mitigate your or anyone’s expectations or impressions of a piece of gear, you have somehow led an amazingly fortunate audiophile life.

Burn in is used all the time by, for instance, high end audio salesmen to mitigate either the impressions, or the expectations, of people auditioning gear. I have auditioned plenty of speakers over the last couple of years and, especially if the speaker was new, I was often cautioned "now, we’ve just got these this week, so they aren’t BROKEN IN, so keep that in mind."

In other words, if you hear something you don’t like...hey...maybe it’s not that you don’t like the speaker...it’s just not broken in yet, so don’t give up on it.

Similarly, similar statements may come after the audition. When asked "what did you think?" I will usually, politely, say what I heard. And if anything like "bright" or other issues come out of my mouth, often enough THEN I’ll be told "Well, the speakers ...(or some other component being used in the audition, cables, amp, DAC or whatever)...were not broken in yet. (This was the case just this month - I mentioned a few issues with a speaker I was interested in during an audition, and the "well of course but we just got the speakers and they aren’t broken in, so you shouldn’t write them off because of that" response came right back).

I doubt many here, who have frequented high end audio dealerships, would never have encountered anything like the above, where the "break in" issue isn’t brought up by salesmen.

Secondly, every manufacturer who claims to the consumer their product requires a "break in" period is, de facto, setting up an excuse for why the consumer may be dissatisfied upon initial set up. That’s the POINT, otherwise there wouldn’t be a point in mentioning it. They may not declare "no, KEEP the item longer, past the break in period" (though in fact, I’ve had one or two speaker manufacturers tell me that), but they ARE setting up an excuse to explain any initial dissatisfaction - "well, the people who wanted early returns hadn’t got past the break-in period, so this discounts their assessment to some degree." That’s the spoken or unspoken scenario set up. And it’s often given voice by audiophiles all the time, even here "Did you allow X to break in? If not...then you didn’t REALLY have a valid assessment of that gear."

As to your own listening tests, if you did indeed to blind testing of burned/not burned in cables and reliably detected a difference, well done! And I can understand why that experience informed your own decisions. Unfortunately we can’t really determine from here how well your tests were conducted.

It’s the same for my own claims for blind tests. They shouldn’t be definitive for anyone else, especially as they weren’t there to oversee the process. (That’s one reason why replicability of results is an important tool in science).

If I could see a report of cable burn in trials, showing objectively measurable differences between a new and burned in cable, with a variety of subjects, the blind test procedure documented and seemingly well run, and if the results were positive for identifying between the cables, I’d certainly take that on board as some evidence for cable burn in claims.
But what we tend to get, even from the Big Cable Manufacturers, are examples like Nordost’s pages on cable burn in. They say it’s required, make some technical claim about what happens...but (as far as I’ve seen) provide NO objective, measured evidence of this happening.

But, nonetheless, once they’ve prayed on your audiophile worries about your cables and endorsed the issue of burn in....the DO have a cable burn in device to sell you to "fix" this. Lucky us! ;-)

wyoboy, I appreciate your perspective on subjective evaluations. I think the key here is that when it all comes down to it, it does not matter. That is not to say this or that tweak doesn’t matter, it is to say that if whatever tweak makes a difference to the person that makes it, then bingo! it works. It does not matter what I think about it.

When I counsel patients on alternative therapies I make sure given therapy will not cause harm and tell them to give it a try. If it relieves their problem and causes no harm, then I’m happy for them even if I myself do not believe there is any real mechanism for that therapy to have helped. And that is not to suggest simply that "it is all in their heads". In fact I do believe it is all in their heads but not in a negative way. I believe that the mind helps heal. And if the mind is convinced of the healing power of some method, then it acts on the body. (This only goes so far. It does not matter how much you believe taking garlic will help your cholesterol, it is NOT going to unclog a blocked coronary artery).

This all puts me in mind of discussions about color. A touchy, though quantifiable variable in the world of photography and printing. In books on the subject there is often an illustration where a hue of red, the same used by Coca Cola, is shown on one page. On the back of the next page there is a scale of red hues and you are asked to pick out Coca Cola red from it. Very few can and most do so by accident (they often can’t do it twice). Some are better than others, but not many nail it consistently. I can help but wonder if there is a similar effect with sound?

Finally, there has been mention of blinded studies. I’m not sure why the audio magazines aren’t full of them. A panel of experts. Same room, same system, equipment not visible. Various songs played at various volumes but only one physical element changed. Experts fill out a check list of important qualities, each one on a 1-5 scale. Then you repeat the whole test 3 times. That’s how you test subjective elements. I’d say panels would need 5-10 experts. Maybe the magazines do this. I suspect most would rather not.