Cable-cooking....my take is a bit different.
I believe that the "exercising" of cables either by brute short-term emf or long-term normal use is about reducing the dielectric involvement of insulations used rather than anything that can possibly happen to the conductors (assuming their solid-metal copper and/or silver).
Audioquest now tries to get around cheap insulation's effects by simply "charging" it with a battery, keeping it at constant "involvement". Whether it sounds good or not is another question.
It's interesting to note that a very old junky-insulation house line, if dedicated, will sound cleaner than a new Romex one. This is because the old cracked insulation has simply lost all its plasticisers, and has much lower dielectric involvement. Selecting insulations with very low dielectric involvement to begin with (vacuum, air, teflon, in that order), of course diminishes the amplitude of the curve...but maybe not it's duration. I state this because I used to be involved in the manufacture of high-precision lab tools made out of fluorocarbons in the 70s, and watched them drift out of calibration over months,or even over a year. Took a while to figure out how to "stabilize" them with brute force after manufacture to prevent subsequent drift. (DISCLAIMER: I use this process to "cure" my PCs to eliminate "burn-in" needs and thus prevent long-term performance drift.) Trouble is this process only works for Teflons and similar high-temp resistant polymers, not the cheap PVCs, nylons, and PEs used in most cables....
It's also my take that the supposed "improvements" with cryo-processing are more related to attemps to "freeze" out the dielectric involvement of insulations used in duplex outlets, cables, etc., rather than any possible fundamental change in behavior of the metal conductors when used at ambient room temperatures. In other words it may be the cryo-processing of the INSULATION, not the metal, that can have a salutory effect. But this is conjecture, whereas the stabilizing of Teflon I'm fully sure of. Cable insulation cookery isn't all crockery by any means! Cheers.
