Do speaker cables need a burn in period?

@prof
" Admittedly with the lack of seriousness in the thread, combined with many of the weird things claimed in the audiophile domain, we can get in to a Poe’s Law situation.. "

Gotta say that is a very odd thing for a fundamentalist to bring up.

Outsiders and anti audiophiles frequently claim audiophile tweaks and audiophile rituals are weird or bizarre. It’s part of a carefully orchestrated smear campaign carried out under the pretense of protecting gullible audiophiles and argued with all the gusto of an English or Philosophy student. Apparently no approval from the top is needed to go after audiophiles, the besmircher can be a lone wolf or homegrown anti audiophile.

Geoff, odd that a "lone wolf" can participate in a "carefully orchestrated smear campaign."  Who exactly is the lone wolf orchestrating with?  Also, interesting to lump outsiders with anti-audiophiles.  "Outsiders" would seemingly have little interest in the peculiarities of audiophiles while "anti-audiophiles" would be expected to play a more proactive role in actually subverting the audiophile tweaking (or twerking?) rituals.  There seems to be a lot of psychology at play here.  Nobody ever said being an audiophile is a bowl of seedless grapes.

Let's me repeat:1. If you think cable burn in is false, then there is a massive world wide conspiracy.
2. If you're right, then everybody in the world is wrong.
Just take your pick and move on.

@prof
"May I ask (just in case you were serious): How in the world do you think a cable could cause "one note bass?"  

(That is a cable that wasn't flat out defective)."
Seems we may have gotten to a " the rub " moment.

So here is the thing, a note in very strict terms is simply pitch and duration. Things that could be seen as more or less just quantitative thingees. Which is something that even the cables you would most likely favour could easily transmit ( much like a wire can transmit something like a telegram signal ). The thing is, the stuff that folks who listen to with stereos is usually music, and music is much more complex than simple pitch and duration because it is the province of musical tone. And yeah musical tone is a close relative of the note but it has this qualitative aspect that is a critical difference.

"Traditionally in Western music, a musical tone is a steady periodic sound. A musical tone is characterized by its duration, pitch, intensity (or loudness), and timbre (or quality).[1] The notes used in music can be more complex than musical tones, as they may include aperiodic aspects, such as attack transients, vibrato, and envelope modulation.

A simple tone, or pure tone, has a sinusoidal waveform. A complex tone is a combination of two or more pure tones that have a periodic pattern of repetition, unless specified otherwise"


A bog standard cable should at the very least be adept at transmitting something as simple as pitch and duration but dealing with more complex timbre, transient vibrato and envelope modulation is a much more difficult undertaking and requires something more refined than a bog standard cable because these qualitative items demand a better phase coherence and freedom from reactive elements such as skin effect than a bog standard cable can offer. And furthermore this ability has be applied to a very broad band signal whereas most cable tech/theory/application tends to concern itself with very narrow bandwidths ( a strategy which communication electronics uses to neatly avoid the problems that phase coherence and reactive elements bring to the table.).
So....any cable can transmit a one note bass but not necessarily a musical tone which is the fine,tonally textured bass that Nonoise refers to and which musical lovers strive to hear as completely as possible when they listen to their systems.That requires something much more refined than bog standard ( which meets the existing theoretic specs and the attendant testing protocols but really sucks at presenting the qualitative aspects of music ).

Btw we had a cable listening session the other day and just for giggles we plugged in a bog standard Belden based cable that we happen to have around ( it was from a company we all know but will not be mentioned here to protect the innocent, and the guilty ) Bottom line , it gave all the quantitative stuff you and your oscilloscope could hope for, but the qualitative stuff that draws you into the musical event was sadly missing. Read it was not involving, or fun, or foot tapping, it sucked ( and yeah that is seriously subjective and you will most likely scream bloody murder....but here is the thing....you can always go back to listen to telegraph wires....and we can go back to our subjective bliss... ).