"Burn in" Are you serious?

Redkiwi and the rest, I will postpone my veredict on burn-in until I have a better room. All I am saying is that at least some of those who are hearing burn-in effects can't possibly because they do not have a revealing enough system-room combination.

By the way, I am not referring to speaker break-in, which is obvious. I am referring to solid state and cable "burn-in" which I cannot really detect.

Joe: The room would explain it if many people did not listen in the near field. I don't ordinarily, but do when I am testing new stuff to buy at home. On the otherside of the coin I have also experienced "burn out" on older tube stuff that I have kept for over ten years. It was, I thought, well maintained. I don't know how revealing the systems were on a whole, but they weren't a match for my ears, that's for sure. If you still have the Silverline's that you mentioned in another thread, I am suprised that you do not hear a difference in new cables. Try reversing a pair of IC's sometime when it's quiet and you have the time to listen. I did this by accident once with a pair of silver IC's and was very upset with the results until I figured out what happened, which only took a few mintes of backtracking.

Joe C.: It has nothing to do with your room. Burn-in is popular with dealers (and some manfuacturers, though certainly not all) because it gives them a way to talk customers out of returning things. It's popular with many audiophiles because it feeds their "everything sounds different and my ears are good enough to hear it" egos. In truth, their ears are probably worse--since they've spent their lives imagining nonexistent differences, they wouldn't know a real difference if it jumped up and bit them on the earlobe. Mechanical systems, like speakers, do change over time--gradualy and perpetually, not suddenly reaching perfection after 100 hours. But it is incontrovertible that people do grow accustomed to a certain sound over time, which is what makes any and all testimonials to these remarkable changes suspect.

A bold claim Jostler3 (see your statement re: incontrovertible). Incontrovertible means: indisputable, factual, and accepted without contoversary. If your statement were true, this thread wouldn't exist? I suggest that this issue (burn in)is very controversial, eg see all the above posts. Craig