Is it worth it to buy the Cable Cooker?

Is Audioengr is looking at designing *and* marketing a cooker? Hmmm. Could be.

Three days ago, I promised to report on my findings in trying out the AudioDharma cable cooker:
1. Before any cooking carefully balancing out the entire system with an old 1966 MONO recording of Brazilian music, with a female singer called Nara, who has a striking alto voice, taking care to have her absolutely in the middle between the speakers. This is an extremely well engeneered studio recording, and her singing comes rock steady from the middle in all the takes on the first side.
2. Removed 1m LEFT channel interconnect (XLO top of the line) between my highly modified Souther and its Helikon (match made in heaven)and the Aesthetix IO.
3. Cooked the cable for not quite three days.
4. Substituted both XLO interconnects briefly with another pair to make sure, that when playing the same LP, Nara's voice would be still dead center. It was.
5. Replaced the other pair, with the cooked side on the left, the uncooked on the right and listened:
Results:
Nara's voice had moved to the left, sort of half a head wide. When I switched the cables, her voice moved to the right, about the same width measured from dead center.
So a cooked cable DOES PLAY LOUDER.
I then listened either to the left or the right channel, with the other on mute, which was easily done on my four chassis Jadis preamp. The cooked channel had easily more presence, the voice was more forward and you could hear deeper into the soundstage, compared to the uncooked channel.
There is a piccolo flute in the background, extremely well recorded, which with the cables uncooked, sounded shrill, but not unpleasant. Listening to it through the cooked cable ist seemed even better defined, but suddenly had such a force, that it hurt my ears. Switching quickly back to the other channel, the sound again was bearable, but less sharply and cuttingly defined.
With Brazilian music you of course have lots of percussion, also bass drums, with quite a wallop. A difference? AND HOW!! Similar in nature to the highs. Better definition and much more punch. PRAT of course also seemed clearly improved across all the frequencies.

So there you are. This cable cooker works and the differences are not subtle and go in the direction a music lover would like. I've chosen an interconnect going from tonearm to prepreamp, which in an uncooked state was already excellent by the way, on purpose of course, the reason being, that here currents flowing are indeed tiny.
As I write this, I have the other side cooking and to my mind anybody who negates the effectiveness of the thing is either deaf or ideologically blind or both. Cheers,

Detlof, glad to see that your results basically match mine. Then again, great minds think alike : )

Much like Detlof, i think that cooking cables presents a much more natural and refined presentation. By "refined", i don't mean "restrained". I think that music played on a system using "burned" cables has a far more natural flow to it. As Detlof mentions, PRAT or the "pace" of the music seems to improve as the system seems to be reproducing all the notes with greater ease and far less effort. The "strain" that you never realized was previously there is now gone, making it oh so apparent. Everything sounds more liquid with less glare, bass passages have the proper "weight" and definition, wind instruments ( especially horns and other brass instruments ) have the proper amount of "bite" ( which are actually micro-bursts of increased amplitude ) that one might hear on a good recording or at a live concert, highs are far more natural with more air and a very "correct" sense of timbre and harmonic structure are present, etc...

As to Detlof's comments about a "burned" cable being "louder", i don't necessarily think that it is "louder" so much as it is a combination of factors. First of all, i think that transient response is improved, compression is reduced and time-smear becomes less critical. Because you can now hear more of the signal in a manner that was more timely, your brain can now process the information faster. In effect, Detlof could "sense" the information being provided faster and cleaner with a burned cable than he could with the unburned cable, so his brain processed that info first. When you hear two signal of equal or near equal amplitude, the signal that makes the initial impact is the one that we perceive as being "louder" or "more jarring". Does this make sense to you ?

Now, to the tech-heads out there, this probably sounds like a LOT of "hooey", so let me try and explain this in layman's terms.

The "compression" and "signal delay" that occur prior to burning has to do with various levels of dielectric absorption that takes place along both the length and depth of the cable. The untreated dielectic creates a time / amplitude / frequency response "skew" that are all inter-related. Amplitude losses may vary with frequency due to the specific dielectrics being used. This in turn would alter the over-all frequency response curve of the cable itself. Phase shift ( changes in signal over time ) may be introduced as frequency response varies due to the frequency dependent dielectric absorption taking place. As such, various cables in unburned form may have very different phase / absorption rates due to the dielectrics being used.

This could possibly explain why using the same conductors with identical geometries but altering nothing more than the dielectric creates such noticeable differences in sound. Could this be why so many people prefer the sonics of Teflon / air based cables ? Both of these "dielectrics" tend to offer the least interaction with the signal. For the record, Teflon is the most "air like" dielectric that we currently know how to make. As such, the involvment ( or lack of it ) of the dielectric and its' side effects may play a MUCH greater role in what we hear and how we hear it. My guess is that these effects take place much like skin effect, as frequency varies, so does the severity ( and noticeability ) of the problem.

As such, "burning" a cable is a two-fold process: It aligns the crystal structure of the conductors which makes for a less "resistive" and "smoother" path. Think of "bumpy crystals" and electrons as being equivalent to you trying to pass across a rocky mountain-side or walking down a paved road. They might measure the same appr distance but one will be able to be traversed in a manner that is both more timely and with a lot less effort. I don't know if electrons "sweat" while working, but maybe that is what we are hearing on unburned cables : )

Burning also minimizes the effects of dielectric absorption, making the cable more linear in time coherency, frequency response and amplitude linearity. That is why we "sense" the changes as an increase in "prat", which is time, amplitude and frequency related. While this may sound far fetched to some, you can think back to this post years from now and remember just how "flat" the Earth was : )

With all of that in mind, I have yet to try a cable that hasn't improved with "burning". Poor to mediocre cables become "acceptable" and good cables only get better. Sean
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PS... the meaning of "PRAT" now stands for Pace, Rhythm, Amplitude, Tempo in MY book. Have any of you ever seen this acronym used with "Amplitude" used for the "A" ?

Thanks Detlof for the review and Sean for the follow-up.
I have a very naive and layman explanation for what happens to cable. It has no science and probably no truth but I think copper wire is copper wire. It has no idea if it's supposed to hold a hanging picture, be a piano string or conduct an electrical signal. It's simply dumb wire waiting to be told weather it's to be used in tension, compression or simply in the state it is. When we wrap it in a dielectric it's still a dumb wire. When we send a low voltage signal through, it carries that signal on the skin of the wire and the signal interacts with the dielectric based on physics. Now if we use a cooker of some sort, something that sends a higher voltage, full spectrum signal through the now semi-educated wire it is taught to be a true conduit of an electrical signal. There are claims of molecular changes, magnetic alignments and crystallization of structure. All of which may be true or not, I have no idea, but I do think wire must be trained to be a conductor and not a simple wire.
So now that I've shown what a complete idiotic moron I am, I'll close.

Anthony, very graciously lent me his Nordost Cooker. Put me down as a believer. The best results were on my Tara Labs Ref Gen II XLR interconnects. IMO is just seems to let more of the music come through, w/o adding any colorations.