Anyone have experience with "burn-in generators"?

An addendum to Ivan nosnibor's post, with which I agree. It's particularly
important to cook phono cables, the ones used from a cart/tonearm to a
phonostag,e because the signal they carry is so minuscule that the cables
never get really broken-in otherwise. Friends and I have also used my
FryKleaner to cook the tonearm wires themselves. Takes a little ingenuity
but is well worth the trouble and, yes, the results are audible in terms of
clarity and openness.

EDIT: Do not have the cartridge attached to the tonearm wires if
attempting this. The idea is to cook ONLY the tonearm wires, which
requires making a wire harness to connect to the clips at the cartridge end.
And do not exceed the number of hours (72 maximum in the case of the
FryKleaner; for others, use the cooker manufacturer's recommendation) for
the tonearm wire "burn." You're dealing with fragile wires here and don't
blame me for any accidents/overcooking/etc :-)

Dopogue - I agree with you. It is almost impossible for a phono cable to burn in with that miniscule signal passing through it. Especially silver ones. Here's what I did.

I got some male RCA's and some reasonable lengths of solid core copper wire of a gauge that fits into the cartridge clips. I soldered the wire to the male RCA's and inserted the other, bare end into the cartridge clips. Then I plugged the male RCA's into my CD player and the other end of the phono interconnect into my preamp inputs (NOT the phono circuit). Then let it spin and break in just like any other interconnect. It burns in both the tonearm wire and the phono interconnact at the same time.

100 hours of that will never be replicated via the output of a regular phono cartridge.

Enjoy,
Bob

Very ingenious, Bob. I did sorta the same thing, but plugged the RCAs attached to the cart clips into my Frycleaner. I burned in the phono interconnects separately, but I see how you could do them at the same time.

I confirm what is said about the Fry. I discovered as well the importance of the dielectricum. What I have done is to make 2 pairs of cables using Mundorf Ag-Au, same gauge, same connectors (WBT), but one pair is teflon isolated and the other is bare and cotton isolated, same geometry. It makes a (huge) difference (before and after Frying)!
batalok

Ed
Ekurilla,

We were asked to test some cable burn-in processes a few years back and it
was interesting to see the various ideas about cable burn-in. Square-waves,
slow triangle rise-fall time, random noise pattern to sinsodial waveforms were
seen from the burn-in boxes; all at different current levels over differing
burn-in times.

Our process

1.) The first thing we did was look at the output waveform from the different burn-in
boxes. [We are asked not to name-names]

2.) Before we did a burn-in, we tested the cables with our network analyzer and captured
their individual Smith-charts: SWR graphed.

2-pair of the same cable-type were used. [a small sample I know...]

3.) We then had some 'quailified' listeners [hand picked] listen to the new cables
and recorded the responses on the cables that we tested.

4.) We then burned the test cables using two ways: 1-set per test process.
a) The high curent pulse burn-in for short periods: 1 amp at 10 pulses,
1 sec per pulse; done one time.
b) Music-burn-in: Mozart-type at 250 mA for 10 minutes
on/off over one hour period.

Our findings were that the Hi-pulse burn-in sounded the worst, while the music-fed
cables sounded better. The Smith charts changed as was expected.

We then tested various wire types made up into the same design as the test cables.
The wires were all copper-wire with different insulations on them.
The softer insulation sounded the warmest while the hardest -teflon_type-
were harsher. We began to test silver wires and other manufactured cables,
but we were asked to stop the testing. [for political reasons]

The insulation changes as we were to discover due to the mechanical boundries of the
insulation's structure. 'Warming' the cable over the normal use of cables relaxes some
of these natural boundries.

Forcing the cable to burn-in quickly seems to be un-needed as the cable will eventually
assume their burn-in configuaration due to 'normal' use. [un-forced]

Also for note:
Cryo-testing was also done with the result of no noticable long term changes in the 'froze' cable.

We tested the 'normal-cables', graphed them and then froze one cable of the set. The two
SWR charts of the test cables were differnt, but after 3 days of normal warimng to room
temperature the froze cable's chart looked like the un-froze cable enetually.
Cryo-treating seems un-necessary.