What Exactly Does "Burn In" do for Electronics?

I don't know what you guys are talkin about. Burn 'out' is more like it. As soon as I get a component back from rebuild, it's awesome for the first little while and then loses that pinnacle of peak performance, settling down to long term stability. Sheesh. WAKE UP!

With the cost of patents these days running around $10,000 bucks a pop that's a lot of spinach to get some supposed credibility. Besides, one stipulation for a patent is you actually have to describe in excrutiatingly detail how the things works. Furthermore, if someone in some godforsaken part of the world is clever enough to knock it off there's not a helluva lot you can do about it. Not to mention curious little audiophiles with too much time on their hands. Lol

Obviously, like most industries with a long history,there are a lot of quality companies and people in high end audio.

Then there are the pure charlatans and everything in between.

It is what it is, not that much different really than most things.

"Burn in" believers imply that something will change for the better after a period of time.
The only way this can happen is if the characteristics of the components change.
All good equipment is measured, tested, calibrated and designed to perform it's best before it leaves the factory.

If any of the above characteristics change after this with "burn in". Then this equipment will not test the same, be in calibration, or measure the way the designer wanted it to remain when it left the factory. And could only sound worse after "burn in".

Ok lets say things do change after "burn in", how does any designer compensate for this, in his calibrations, measurements, tests and design????

The only thing in audio I know of that can change "sound" for better or worse, are mechanical things like speaker suspension systems

Cheers George

"Ok lets say things do change after "burn in", how does any designer compensate for this, in his calibrations, measurements, tests and design????"

They compensate for this by breaking the prototypes in before they listen and measure. For example, a designer may want to try several different capacitors when building an amp to see which one sounds the best. If they want to try 5 different options, they break the amp in 5 different times. They don't do any serious listening or measurements until they break the amp in first. This is the way they all do it. I don't think you could find one company that doesn't break their equipment like this. You don't have to take my word for it, either. Call some manufactures and ask them.