"Burn in" Are you serious?

Waldhorner's thread is somewhat extreme, but there is a measure of truth within. The ear/brain can deliver the ultimate decision, but it's a system that is easily fooled. My recommendation is accept this as a "fact" and go on about listening to the music. Stop worrying, stop making sense.

Actually, I had a chance to do a side by side comparison a couple of years ago. I had gotten two identical lengths of brand new Kimber 4TC speaker wire. I was going to bi-wire my speakers. I wanted to make sure the wire sounded all the same so I listened to each run in mono, single wired. No differences. Then I listened in stereo, single wired. Again no differnece between pairs. Well, I was going away for vacation for 10 days and decided to put one pair on my old Duo-Tech cable enhancer. The other pair was left connected to the speakers. I came back, listened to the system for a while and then changed out the "green" 4TC for the "aged" 4TC. Oh my...what a difference! Immediate and obvious improvements in smoothness, dynamics and soundstage. I went back and forth several times to make sure and even bi-wired in mono. Yep, the differences were still there and still obvious. This was one of the most dramatic demonstrations of "burn in" I've encountered.

To conduct an experiment with new -vs- broken in on the cheap... Pick up two sets of Radio Shack Gold IC's. They are are sold in sets of two for under $15.00 at my local RS (mine were different primary colors). Break in one set and then compare them to the other. If you have SS equipment I would say that the sound that they have before break in is "tuby" (not good tuby, but tuby nonetheless). I once used then to patch our mini system into the main rig and found that in the beginning they sounded like my old tube equipment (like the equipment used to sound when I had replaced "all" of the tubes at once with new ones). Tubes used to be inexpensive and I used to replace then all at once (did the same with my guitar amps as well). The "tube" sound wears off as they break in (quickly in the first 12 to 20 hours from my experience). I even switched to the unused pair at one point just to hear this sound again (kind of liked the illusion).

Check out the thread...burn in Vs. getting used to a sound.

I once had a 2 meter pair of Nordost SPM interconnects cut in two and reterminated by Nordost into two 1 meter pairs. One pair sounded about the same as before, but the second pair needed almost a month of constant playing before they sounded like the other pair (more harsh at first). I concluded burn-in of cables may be from one end to the other, so one half was still burned in, the other like new.