The connector (if designed and made and used properly with such as respect to the materials) should be stable and remain stable.
The insulation will change for a time after manufacture (probably a few weeks in the case of PTFE and a few months in the case of PE & PP), and this will also be affected by the solder joints and will settle down as part of the settling process of the solder joints.
I’d expect any of those changes to be caused primarily by environmental factors rather than by flowing current through them, which is what “burn in” would suggest. Please note that the phenomenon being described is linked to playing music on them, not just having them in place.
Additionally, the things you mentioned could perhaps make the cables perform worse, not better, whereas proponents of burn in always seem to end up with gear performing better at the end of the period than some kind of coin toss where those effects could also turn out to be deleterious.
That describes the mechanical ‘burn in’ of loudspeakers - I think nearly everyone accepts that.
Coming from reading so many other folk talk about stressed burndys touching the wall or floor. Cable ties in the correct positions and the cable shaker - this all seems like a big wind up.
Again that is mechanical (as also is the ‘settling down’ of newly formed solder joints); this limited form of ‘burn in’ is fairly well accepted.
the stressing of the insulator’s electric behavior is the burn in. The article talks about burn in of loudspeakers and cables. They refer to some scientific theories i don’t know unfortunately.
This is probably what everyone experiences here, the insulation dielectric is in effect as vital as the core.
if a constant signal goes through a conductor, this conductor will normally have its properties modified, not?
Indeed I believe not. Why? How? By what mechanism? What is the passage of current affecting in it?
Current through the resistance of the wire will cause heating. But in an interconnect the current is only microamps/microwatts. As I indicated before, the temperature rise caused by the microwatts of power that represents through an interconnect will raise the cable’s temperature by far less than that caused by temperature changes of normal ambient air, so if the wire, its insulation or connections were to be susceptible to change in within the range of fractions of a degree, that would happen anyway during the likely many hours of storage between manufacture of the cable and connection to the hifi, and to a greater degree than the current would cause.
No, as IB points out, the conductor is unaltered by relatively low currents.
However lower quality insulation materials such as PVC can be affected by long term exposure to even weak electric fields; these fields don’t however affect PTFE, PE or PP.
Interesting. What experiments have you tried, and how have you eliminated psychological effects?
i was invited by the NASA to do the test with 100 other people. During 14 days we listened to 1000 cables new and after 100 hours burn in.
It was so interesting !
Wow! At an intensive 14 hours per day between eating and sleeping you had a maximum of 6 minutes per cable assessment. It must have been quite exhausting.
What was NASA doing it for? Do they have high end hifi on board the International Space station?
But how was the experiment done, and how were psychological and physiological effects eliminated?
they intend now to throw the Naim Statement in the galaxy, to give the opportunity to other extra earth living people to hear it.
the effects were that all my psychological and physical capacities were exhausted. No more.
I find that whenever I read the ND555 impressions thread
for me it’s the MQA thread …
Do you have an link to the NASA experiment? I’ve Googled without success.