Burn in - a myth?

Hi man. Don’t know what your trip is but you’re sure flying high! Really living it! Outa sight man! :grinning:

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I don’t think most here are not believing you, that you are hearing changes. The issue is, we know the brain/hearing adapts/changes so how can you be certain the changes are from burn in or something else, when you’ve done nothing to verify this? You can’t tell, or won’t be aware when the brain/hearing is adapting.

When I posted the example above, about the change in sound with the power cord that initially sounded bright/fatiguing but after what I thought was burn in, became rather enjoyable. I heard specific changes, I fully thought it was from burn in (as I knew nothing about our ability of hearing to adapt & only knew of people talking about cables need time to burn in). I’m not even sure what made me think to put the original cable back in to compare, but at the time it shocked me (& went back & forth multiple times to confirm this).

My speaker example was the same thing, this was not a specific test I was doing, just regular listening. Again, after listening to the small system & it sounding better & better each day (& then out of the blue realizing the mid bass suck out had completely disappeared), if this had any new pieces of kit in it, I too would have thought it must be from burn in, just happened in this case I knew that wasn’t possible, so thought I would investigate it further.

I can give other examples of this happening, but I think this proves my point. I wasn’t expecting these results at the times (actually was expecting the opposite), I heard specific changes but they turned out to be not from what I thought they were from. You can’t just say, I heard changes so the only explanation is its from burn in, if you haven’t done any sort of thing to prove otherwise. And again, I’m not saying I don’t believe in burn in, just that its not the only thing that comes into play.

On top, it has also been mentioned, not only do we have these two issues, but we have countless other things that have an impact on sound, which further muddies the waters. What time of days were you listening, what was the power quality like, what was your mood, what was the temp/humidity/barometric pressure, did you have a drink, etc, etc, etc. So many factors come into play.

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For reasons I won’t elaborate on I had two brand new Chord Epic RCA cables in the house at the same time. One stayed boxed and the other was connected between my Chord Qutest DAC and my amp. It sounded pretty good. Then over the next few days the sound deteriorated badly. Compressed dynamics, congested mids, slow poorly defined bass. Awful. I wasn’t too worried as I had experienced similar effects before and I was sure the sound would come back on-song before too long.

My wife however was having none of it. "What’s happened to the sound? It sounds terrible. We’re not paying £500 for something that sounds like that! It didn’t sound like that when you first connected it. There must be something wrong with it. Try the other one.’

So I dutifully connected the brand-new other sample. Presto! It sounded far better. For a few days. Then the same terrible sound.

My wife wanted to send them back. I said we need to persevere. It’s just burning in and it will come right in the end. And it did and now sounds absolutely superb, worth every bit of the £500 purchase price.

So there we are. No doubt in your book this was some kind of shared hallucinatory experience. Or fluctuations in mains supply quality. Or this or that. Any damn reason other than the most obvious - that the sound of the cable changed as it burnt in and we both clearly heard it.

But as there can be no physical reason for it in your book I guess you’ll need to invent some other reason. :roll_eyes:

Strange that these ‘countless other issues’ have always happened in exactly the same way and with the same sort of effects every time I insert a brand new cable into the system. They don’t happen any other time, like for example if I swap a cable for another burnt-in one.

It amazes me why people try so very very hard, postulating all sorts of bizarre physical and psychological effects, to avoid having to conclude that cables cannot change in sound as they burn-in. Presumably because they have already made up their minds that burn-in cannot be real as they cannot conceive of any causative physical mechanism.

At the end of the day I really couldn’t care less what you hear, or don’t hear or what you believe or don’t believe. It’s up to you.

But don’t try to tell me that you know what I’m experiencing better than I do. I prefer to trust my own ears and make my own judgement on what I believe to be real or imaginary.

I care about your opinion of my experiences about as much as you should care about my opinion of yours.

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You seem to be becoming very agitated, but if you read the posts above again, you’ll see that no one is really doubting what you experienced. Or at least I don’t recall such a post.

For example, this statement. It comes across unnecessarily antagonistic. Unnecessarily, because I doubt anyone here will say you didn’t (both) hear it. The only question would be why burn-in is the most obvious cause? To me it would be the least obvious.

Talking about the cause of your experience, or the mechanism or burning in as was done earlier in the thread, shouldn’t be an issue I think. Isn’t that something that we can discuss and/or debate and even agree to disagree? Precisely what a forum is for.

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PJL,

I’m sorry to disagree with you again, but you do imagine things.

For example, when we listen to music in stereo, we may imagine that the vocals are in the centre of the sound-stage, or that the keyboards are just to the left of that, etc… Good systems might even make us imagine that one or more of the instruments are actually in front of, or behind, or above the rest of the music. This is not actually happening. The sound is being produced by the drivers of two mono speakers, but ours brains create the sound stage which we all love.

In hifi and in other areas of life, we all imagine things which probably aren’t true – sometimes I even imagine that my views are worth hearing!

Brian D.

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As an honorary doctor of philosophy and an accomplished contemporary artist, my most favourite field of knowledge is that of Phenomenology.
The ultimate arbiter is that of human experience.
Science and other multidisciplines can only really outline truths.

Since we are predisposed to rely on other such facts for many things in life that need solid science and math.
Don’t confuse that with Aesthetics -the nature of how we experience things. :rofl:

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Sure it is, sure it is… :roll_eyes:

Dad, you are blowing my mind man! :grinning:

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Isn’t that exactly what many of us do when we audition pieces of kit over several days/weeks/months?

At this point, I don’t know what to say. You initially spoke of threads like this getting out of hand & the only person in here that seems to be getting all worked up over nothing, is you. You are arguing over points I never even made & sometimes specifically said the opposite. No matter what I post, you seem to interpret it in how ever way you see fit, so I’ll just leave it at that as this seems to be going nowhere.

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IMG_3681

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It’s time to stop feeding the troll.

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You can only confidently be sure, or not as the case may be, of what you imagine. And you appear to imagine that you know me better than I do myself. You do seem rather prone Brian to imagining things.

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I don’t think PJL is a :troll:.

I find the vigour and single-mindedness of his argumentation edifying. :nerd_face:

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PJL,

Your last response to me made no sense whatsoever, either grammatically or logically and I tend to agree with n-lot’s analysis, above. It’s getting to the point where your approach is somewhat beyond the spirit of this forum, where tolerance, courtesy and good humour are usually the norm. Consequently, I will not be engaging with you further on this matter.

Please do not bother replying to this message.

Over and out!

Brian D.

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As is typical with these sorts of threads, those who do not believe will postulate any number of bizarre and unlikely scenarios in order to explain away the experiences of those who do, and to therefore maintain the status quo of their own belief systems.

Speaking for myself, as a believer in cable burn-in effects, because I have heard it, I know the phenomenon is real. I cannot prove it, because that is not possible. Nor frankly even is it desirable.

Everybody is free to believe what they like. The difference between myself and the non-believers is that `I do not try to convince anybody that they are wrong. If you don’t hear it then you don’t.

I do not, and have never, claimed that burn-in is a universal phenomenon that all will experience.

The non-believers on the other hand are ever eager to convince people like myself that we imagine what we hear, or that there are alternative explanations, however bizarre and implausible. We are required to provide ‘scientific proof’ of our experience or else admit that we simply imagined or misinterpreted it.

Of the two approaches, which one strikes you as the more open-minded and scientific?

I submit that the non-believers, by and large, have fairly closed minds. If something doesn’t seem to make sense to them or they cannot conceive of a causative mechanism because it is either beyond our present scientific understanding, or, in the greater number of cases, simply beyond their personal knowledge or understanding, then they dismiss it out of hand. It simply cannot happen.

Again as is usual, the refusal of people like myself to be willing to concede that other people know me better than I do myself, or that they have a better knowledge of what I personally experience than I do myself, results in them attempting to label people like me as some sort of subversives with a hidden agenda.

Sadly, these threads always end like this. I should have known better than to expect genuine open-minded discussion rather than the usual crop of nay-sayers who simply want to beat one into submission. The herd mentality.

Time to get my hat and coat.

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What convinced me otherwise was his last response to me. I simply tried to explain that no-one questioned his experience and asked to have a courteous discussion. Even explicitly saying agreeing to disagree is fine and not even trying to convince him of anything. The response was telling IMO.

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Burn-out :fire:

I’m with you, no drugs in any shape or form, it’s not allowed<

380 posts later, no conclusion, people falling out.
Really think these sort of threads should be avoided, they are of no value ultimately.