A couple of humorously wrong remarks from the good Dr. Greenman. BTW, my Ph.D. is in an area of physics and also from an ivy league school, but like other Ph.D's, I don't advertise it.
"Just as pilots have to learn to ignore their fallible
senses and trust their instrumentation - or they end up
like JFK Jr; you have to realize that your ears are not
the fine tuned instrumentation you think they are."
I worked for many years in defense systems, specifically on the radar systems used by fighter pilots. As to sensory phenomena, pilots use radar to detect objects coming at them, meaning missiles and other aircraft. A fighter pilot looking at a screen can detect the presence of a target (signal in a noise background) much sooner than any automated algorithm we've ever known how to write. This is an extremely well-recognized issue called "man in the loop". The reasons why trained human beings are better at detection than instrumented detectors is that in the instrumented system, the designer uses linear statistics. A trained human, on the other hand, uses non-linear, and sometimes highly biased statistics based on past experience, on assessments of his situation, and on a lot of experience in dog fights. A commercial pilot will get killed by a missile when a fighter pilot will get out of the way, just exactly because the commercial pilot is inexperienced and not expecting it. But they are both looking at the same radar screen. We know how to write the mathematics of non-linear models, we just don't know how to emulate the human judgement process.
In reality, I believe there are many parallels in auditory phenomena to the visual process that I have described.
As to cable break-in, I recall that Jon Risch listed a long series of potential changes in the early hours of cable use, including burn off of plasticizers or other manufacturing residues, dielectric changes, capacitor formation.
