Burn In = Voodoo?

Cwlondon - if you have been an enthusiastic audiophile for 20 years and never noticed the sound of a new component change over its first two weeks, then obviously the effect of burn-in is irrelevant to you. I find it hard to imagine that you have not heard it, because I have heard it happen so many times - and before anyone mentioned "burn-in" to me. For example, every time I have bought a new pre amp or power amp there have been a couple of weeks where the sound goes from "about right" out of the box, then increasingly thin and weedy, then suddenly fat and cloyingly warm, and then a slow sharpening up to becoming "about right" again. Then the sound just gets more and more natural for a further couple of weeks. These changes have never been subtle for me. Even if you just put a speaker cable that has lain in the cupboard for a few weeks into your system, the sound changes are very significant (for me) over about a week.

One thing I keep wondering about is this freezing of cables in liquid nitrogen. It is common to do an experiment for school kids with a rubber ball. First, it is dropped on the ground, and bounces higher than your head. The ball would next be immersed in liquid nitrogen. Then thrown against a wall. It then shatters as if it was hollow crystal. I am not sure of the compound used in the ball. Cables are made of teflon(PTFE), polypropylene(PP), polyethylene(LDPE or HDPE), polyester(PET/PETE or PBT), etc. I have no idea which would be adversely affected in the liquid nitrogen, and which would not(I no longer work in a lab, or else I could test this). But, I do know that I would be kind of devastated if my $1000 interconnect was destroyed. Don't think the cable companies cover that in their warranties...

Jostler, good point, had to grin when I wrote my thread, thinking, that finally it would prove nothing, because it might only prove my own suggestibility. About phonewires though, aren't phone signals very narrow band? Well whatever, your point is good, will have to think up another experiment. (:

If the phenomenon of "burn-in" just means that one is "getting used to the sound", then the opposite should be true also, ie "burn-out". For example, I have a tube pre-amp and after a year or so music gradually became brighter, harder, and more fatiguing. Over a couple of months it got worse and worse, and finally to the point where I just didn't want to listen anymore. But being persistent, I kept looking for a reason for the increasingly terrible music. It finally dawned on me that that I had NEVER changed the tubes in my pre-amp. Duh!! So, I put in a new set of stock Sovtek 6922s and Viola' the music was back, and over the next couple of weeks, it even got better as the tubes burned in. It seems to me that if a person just "gets used to" whatever sound his system is making, then my perception of the music should have just changed to accomodate the gradually changing (worsening) music quality caused by the tubes reaching the end of their useful life. And if this is true, an audiophile should be just as happy with a $799. complete Circuit City system-- after all, he would just get used to whatever the music quality was. No? Cheers. Craig.

J_k, I had to answer my own question. Absolute Zero is the temperature at wich all molecular translational movement in a gas ceases. Now Helium has the lowest critical temparature -268 Degrees celsius, a point where a substance cannot exist in a liquid state, so a tempurature of abolute zero -273 degrees celsius has no physical meaning, just a point of reference on the absolute scale. What all this translates to in degrees fehrenheit is that these temps are much colder than the temp. your freezing cable to. So I'll buy the idea, but the "scientist" in you needs a bit more schooling. (oh yea, this is all subject to change in that my reference material is a bit dated. there were only 103 elements at that time, and from my kids books I believe that has changed, a bunch.)
Anyway, this was bugging me, sorry for taking the space in that I see from this and an earlier post a couple months ago that none of you care! J.D.