I have an RB300, and I am upgrading the cable from the tonearm to the preamp. Should I change the internal tonearm wire also? Was the wire used in the Rega's good enough? What is the proper procedure to 'burn in' the new cable?
You could also seek out Alan Kafton's "Cable Cooker" or someone with that device-I'm sure that one has the ability to burn in phono cables. Other alternatives might be (not sure whether they have the capability to deal with a mini-din phono) the Nordost cable burner or Jim Hagermans Fry Cleaner.
As Albert has pointed out, the low level signal from most phono cartridges (and particularly low output MC's) is, in many people's opinions not enough to ever fully burn in the phono cable. That, combined with something like cryoing the cable (I recently bought a new cryoed phono cable from Gene at Take Five Audio who offers the added value service of burning the cable in on the cable cooker which is a superb service as far as I'm concerned) makes burn in of the phono cable even more important.
I hook mine up to my CD player and my pre amp and leave my system on 24/7 until the cables have aprox 300 hours on them. That said I ordered my current phono cable from my dealer with instructions to the manufacturer to burn them at the factory. They came with 300 hrs burn in on an industrial strength cable cooker. After that I only ran them on my CD player for 48 hours and they were done.
My Stealth Hyperphono cable is not suggested by the manufacturer to be broken in with a high level signal due to it's design. My cart is .5mv output.
WHat I have done in the past to break in phono stages is is that I made a reverse RIAA signal of white noise (and some music as a test that the levels are correct) I play this in quicktime or another player and set it to loop. I lower the output of the computer to very low, and also the output of the quickime player to very low. Between these 2 volume adjustments I can get the very low signal that mimics the output of a cart. I use the music track to make sure I am not overloading the phono stage.
I should probably try this combined with Alberts suggestion about making the din to RCA cable then I could set a slightly hotter signal that the cart would be outputting - maybe double .
If anyone needs the inverse RIAA files I have them in both mp3 and aif formats. email me.
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