Does Power Cord Require Burn-In To Sound Good?

My advice: If you bought a $5K amp and it doesn't sound good with the cord it came with, but you think supplying it with a $5K power cord will make it sound great - save your $5K and buy an amp. that has a decent power supply and sounds great with the cord it comes with....Jim

Clarification: Most amps, pre-amps CPDs and DACs do sound better after a period of warm up (usually 20 - 30 min. for tubed gear and sometimes several hours for SS gear) and most equipment will sound marginally better after a period of break in - hours, not hundreds of hours. So the above statement is assuming that the amp is a good match with your other devices and speaker load and has been adequately warmed up and broken in itself....Jim  

Well what I think is that burn in is not enough. I put a heat strip around my power cables to maintain a minimum of 150 degrees F. If you do not do this the burn in reverts to unburn in and then you are back to square one. If you ever let your power cable temp drop below 150F the degradation to your fidelity is quite pronounced. Also you need to keep your power cables suspended above and off any hard heat absorbing surfaces. There is a tendency for the side of your heat stripped cable adjacent to the heat absorbing surface to be a bit cooler. This can cause there to be an unbalanced audio signal which can be quite distracting. Carpet is OK for a contact surface for instance where an oak floor is not. I also recommend that your heated power cable be sheltered from AC ducts in the summer for the same reason. You can never be to careful when the finest outcomes in audio are what you not only strive for but demand.

@mahlman  I put a heat strip around my power cables to maintain a minimum of 150 degrees F

 WOW! This keeps getting more bizarre all the time....Jim

This is an open ended question, as a manufacturer I know what my customers tell me.  While a quality cable will show an immediate change, burn in time will show additional changes.  It can be as short as 5 hours or as long as 100 hours.  The changes are usually in openness, bottom end and sound stage, and brightness can soften over time.  In general there is a minimum of 10 hours before you should even start to develop an opinion.  As an example, our Interconnects are all over the place in the first 50 hours, then they start to settle down and do what they are supposed to.  There are to many variables to say just how long a burn in time should be.  But that's my 2 cents...