"Burn in" Are you serious?

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.

Well Waldhoerner if you don't have a "broken in" unit to compare to the new and you don't have an A pair and B pair and a cable enhancer like 1953 and you are at the sole discretion of your ears and you have a decent aural memory, assuming you have heard a "broken in" unit it might go something like Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun's decision on pornography back in the early 70's, "I can't describe it I just know it when I see it". Well that could be paraphrased to your question something like "I don't know if it's "burned in" yet but will when I hear it". Most of these things are gradual improvements that just become evident over extended listening. Sometimes not at all. Or maybe they do but you really don't notice the change until you can compare it with a new identical item. I have done that and noticed differences at that point. The wishful thinking comes into play when you hope that the amount you spent on the item was worth purchasing it in the first place!

I have taken some flack for my view on burn in, but here is MHO. I do believe in burn in... I do I do I do. I agree with most of what has been said above, which is in line with my experiences. I do not believe that something which sounds absolutely dreadful out of the box will be "transformed" into something wonderful by something like 100 hours of use. You may go from dreadful to marginally acceptable, and someone may have experienced something different, but I do not believe this would be the average, everyday experience.