Cable burn in

No i can not give you a precise quote as i do not research things.
However there are very very few equipment makers who do not regard
Burn in as desirable and i seem to have read when they are asked questions
about it this is a common reason they give i have also read it from people
who are Technical in this regard and they tend to present it as a matter of fact.
It has got to the state where i believed it was coming into common acceptance
apart from those pockets who still deny cables sound different because it is Scientificly
impossible. I am unsure if it has got to a measurable state but i did get the impression
scientific reasons had been established for it to be so.

The only thing i could add here is the insulation would be specific
to 240v safety and possibly cause a greater audible change than
more exotic types audio cable makers like to use.

Some home Hi-Fi speakers and higher end headphones designed for music replay DONOT by design provide a flat response.

There is something called the Harman curve… look it up, lots of research and development around this. In essence it’s the idealised response to sound for attractive for or pleasing for music replay.

You can assume that the music, if mastered well, is mastered to a flattish response, any variants are part of the artistic design.

The Harman curve is below… very common for headphones, and ideal result for room speaker coupling.

It’s also believed that some high end cables act as shunt filters to help provide some aspects of the Harman curve.

Yeah I have seen this before. Really interesting. I’ll take another look. Hard to imagine it sounding good when you look at it though isn’t it.

I am not suggesting that the brain is a magical device - I am questioning whether some people think that it is, capable of consistently detecting and measuring things that no scientific instrument can.

On what cables, at what temperatures reached or voltages applied, and over what period of time? Those will be significant factors in changing dielectric, as indeed will the composition of the insulation.

By way of context, of audio cables the highest voltage and potentially highest temperatures would be speaker cables when playing very loud through inefficient speakers, but even then averages unlikely more than 10V and maybe up to 1 amp or so, with even peaks rarely more a few 10s of volts.

indeed the difference between real world and some labs :slight_smile:

I didn’t know that, perhaps I should stop worrying about the depression in the FR from my in room response (compared to average) from 160Hz with a slowly rising tail to 500Hz (max -5dB at 210Hz).

P.S. I don’t actually worry about it as the system suits my ears/brain - rather I should stop thinking about ways to fix it and consider it instead to be a small midrange boost!
(Compared to Harman OE 2017 it’s effectively +3 db boost 800Hz to 1.5kHz and a 3db cut to the peak 2kHz to 6KHz, and yet the system doesn’t lack ‘presence’. It’s sort of like a somewhat less exaggerated version of the Harman curve.)

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I also would be interested in what changes could be observed in PTFE, PP, PE and XPE dielectrics; as none of these polymers show significant charge distributions, and hence are completely unaffected by electric fields until the field strength starts to approach their dielectric strength.

Mechanical relaxation & listener auto-adaption I can understand, but in neither case can these be appropriately called ‘cable burn in’ as they aren’t in any way related to electrical effects (current?) ‘burning in’ the cable.

Maybe I just don’t understand polymers any more; my research work in polymers was conducted many years ago.

That was my point you are saying the Brain has no more capabilities for deduction
and nuance etc. than an instrument. If you are not one out here in the world of Science,
Metaphysics and the odd instance of unexplainable E.S.P. i would be surprised.
I do not think the Brain is confined to the instrument of the time.

It was not me that at attributed there is any change to the Dielectric - it comes from those
who are invested with that knowledge. I think there is insufficient information available
for you to presuppose conditions needed for it to occur.

I dont think you misunderstand anything!
But as i have stated the number of Equipment Makers that vouch for burn in is
extraordinarily high - if you wish maybe attribute it to something else?

I don’t understand your confusion. The brain is not magic - there are no unexplainable instances of ESP, and I don’t understand what you mean by “confined to the instrument of time”. There is nothing particularly special about the brain. It does some remarkable things, but it is, at the end of the day, flawed in many ways. There are many instruments that are far more capable of detecting and measuring physical phenomena than the brain.

Dielectrics have been well studied, and whilst of course it is always possible that causes of some effects might not be known, much is. That is why I asked in what cables was it accepted because as well as the specific dielectric medium things like voltage or heat are factors of significance - but those is a world of difference between voltages and heat in cables with different uses. And I guess it’s why @anon39880737 asked about the source of your statement about effect being accepted and by whom. There are things claimed and accepted among the audiophile fraternity that are more likely to have a psychological, even physiological, cause than physical . That is different from things that are accepted because they are actual fact or proven by proper testing - which need not include scientific measurements because of course it is conceivable that not every possible thing will have been tested, or for some things measurements may not have been sensitive enough - but just as with setting up scientific measurements, for audio tests using humans the tests have to eliminate possible bias, and that is very rarely done, so acceptance by a body of people dies not mean it is fact.

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My goodness, so many circular arguments about this phenomenon/pseudo-phenomenon.
Empirical observation:
In my own experience of installing my cables, the new item does sound different to the one I demoed to at home…
…and…
I instal the new item at home, then leave it burning in for 100 hours while not listening (his works for IC cables)…
…and guess what, there is an easily perceived change in sound.
Empirical observations, as long as they are valid, cannot be rationalised away.

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Ah yes, the thread is currently at the bottom of the Harmen curve. I don’t see it improving anytime soon. :joy:
Don’t let me stop anyone though I am enjoying it.

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I agree! but discussing one aspect of burn in which myself and many people
can audibly determine with an open - not biased mind is not making it go away.

That’s the rub.

I’m happy to accept that burn in could be a thing.

But evidence that it is a real thing would need to consist of more than anecdotal observations, if you wanted to convince others about it.

How can you be sure you are approaching this with an open mind? As others have noted, there are many possible explanations for the apparent phenomenon, not least confirmation bias. Yet you are convinced that none of those explains it.

If you went to a friend’s house and observed that their system sounded different, and then discovered that one cable had been changed, and this took place a hundred times at different places, and you didn’t incorrectly observe that the system was different, that would be the start of an evidence based approach.

Of course you are free to believe it, and like I said, I don’t flat out dismiss it. But if you want to convince sceptics that you are right, it needs more than a potentially biased observation.

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                         COLOURS

OK, so the whizz bangers were tom thumbs pity!
And the silent and intelligent majority said NAH! I’m not going there!
This emerged from outside the UK. around 1990 and was not widely discussed.
People claiming they could hear a change in sound when the only variable was the colour.
I did a couple of tests and i have to say it was not too hard to hear this.
Science provided a plausible reason why this could be true it was down to the
different metallic pigmentations in each colour.
The least affected colours being Black, White and then Grey.
You dont often get a choice but when i can i stick to those colours.

Do i need a reason that would convince others of what i hear?
If you need convincing i might give you 1/2 a reason as self justification.
But after that you are 100% on your own.