Do speaker cables need a burn in period?

nonoise,

Prof, do yourself a favor and check out the specs on a set of Darwin Truth II ICs and a pair of Blue Jean Cables ICs and you'll get it.

Hardly.

I looked at the Darwin website and it seemed to be full of all the dubious justifications as any other high end cable manufacturer.  In the "why you should buy Darwin" page, they say they "painstakingly tested by ear..."

That's hardly a good start, especially when the very process of "testing by ear" is the one being disputed.  That's like a homeopath saying "We painstakingly tested our remedies by ingesting!"   Kind of leaves out the problem of bias.

They go on to make all the dubious claims we see repeated in this forum, but with no other support for the claims than "we just said it" or "we heard it." 

The Darwins are well within spec and yet they sound demonstrably better.

When you know which cable you are using, right?

I still see no plausible argument given for why a lower cost, competently built cable would produce "one note bass" while passing a huge variety of (musical) bass signals.  It's just a claim wafting in the air.  

prof, 
All you need to do is to actually listen to it and you'll climb down from your high horse and finally put it out to pasture.

I looked at the Darwin website and it seemed to be full of all the dubious justifications as any other high end cable manufacturer. In the "why you should buy Darwin" page, they say they "painstakingly tested by ear..."

Although I agree some (especially online) cables makers are a bit of a suspect, but to say there is a massive world wide conspiracy is something altogether.

Taras,

A bog standard cable should at the very least be adept at transmitting something as simple as pitch and duration but dealing with more complex timbre, transient vibrato and envelope modulation is a much more difficult undertaking and requires something more refined than a bog standard cable because these qualitative items demand a better phase coherence and freedom from reactive elements such as skin effect than a bog standard cable can offer.

So you claim.

I don’t see anything to support your claim.

So....any cable can transmit a one note bass but not necessarily a musical tone which is the fine, tonally textured bass that Nonoise refers to and which musical lovers strive to hear as completely as possible when they listen to their systems.That requires something much more refined than bog standard ( which meets the existing theoretic specs and the attendant testing protocols but really sucks at presenting the qualitative aspects of music ).

This is clearly false.

I have "bog standard" belden speaker cables and it’s simply, and hilariously, false that they are producing "one note bass" or incapable of transmitting complex bass passages, or tonally distinct bass. In fact I have found that in terms of definition and all the tonal qualities we audiophiles often seek in accurate bass, such qualities are a distinguishing feature of the sound I get at home.  Using my current Thiel 2.7 speakers this is true, but it was eve more true with my bigger 3.7 speakers. I could go to my friend’s place, listen to a system using $50,000 of Nordost cable and come home to bass reproduction that easily surpassed that system. When over the past couple years I auditioned a large variety of speakers, in systems using many of the top high end cable brands we could name, every time I came home and played the same bass torture tracks on my system, it distinguished itself in how controlled, beautifully pitched and even holographically placed the bass could appear.

Audiophile pals, musicians, and a friends who review high end audio all have been blown away by what they hear at my place, despite the "bog standard" cables in place.

So, please, don’t give me this about the things "bog standard" cables "can’t do."

Secondly, it’s clearly false in that "bog standard" cables are used all the time to transmit musical information, bass included, accurately and as tunefully as they musician desires. No one needs to use Teo Audio or Nordost cables between their bass guitar and their bass amp. A standard quality cable does this quite fine. As do "bog standard" cables that connect instruments direct in to mixing boards, or via microphone to mixing boards, through all sorts of other "bog standard" cables in the chain of recording, mixing, mastering for most music sources.

If "bog standard" cables could not transmit and preserve the type of nuance you are talking about, IT WOULDN’T BE THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE IN THE RECORDINGS that used bog-standard cables.

And, yes, your subjective anecdote about the belden cable meant nothing. It’s ludicrous to leap from your own subjective emotional involvement to some objective idea belden cables are incapable of transmitting musically relevant information. I have gobs of emotional connection to the music coming through my system, and to how it sounds.

All your claims only serve to underline how many poor arguments one encounters justifying audiophile cables (and burn in, etc).

Hey here is something to think about. All the naysayers need to think about what lays beyond known physics. The unknown. People are hearing differences and the  current testing equipment cannot pick up on the differences. AB testing is a farce. You have to evaluate for long periods of time to notice the small differences.