Speaker Break In: Fact or Fiction? (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Speaker Break In: Fact or Fiction? (2005)

audioholics.com

19 pointspmoriarty8 comments

There's an entire sub-industry devoted to this sort of nonsense. Besides, everyone knows you have to break in your cables, too (sigh). I present the Cable Cooker:

http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue47/cablecooker.htm

Which begs the question: is there a break-in process for the Cable Cooker itself? Is there a Cable Cooker cooker?

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/anyone-own-an-audiodh...

How long do you leave cables on the cable cooker? Are there significant time differences for PCs, SCs, ICs, silver, copper, etc.? Does the unit come with detailed instructions and guidelines?

- Takes the guessing out of "is this cable burned in yet?" I would describe the effect as perhaps taking the rough edge off of new cables and bringing a little life back into old cables that have been unused for awhile.

- What they said, read the web site and experiment. Benefits are lower noise floor and u can hear more deeply into the sound stage. May be worth repeating every 6 months for 4-6 hours

Don't worry. You do not need a cable cooker cooker, because every cooker (in the latest generations, natch) is cryogenically treated before ever leaving the manufacturer. If you have an old cable cooker you may want to bury it deep underground in the Saskatchewan for two consecutive winters. Repeat this as often as necessary.

Bummer, I was hoping to get an early jump on the cable cooker cooker cooker market. /s

On a more serious note, I wonder if this product was inspired by profit potential or a high degree of stupidity. I could imagine a conversation between 'car guys' going something like, "fast cars need to be warmed up, so the same should apply to our sweet sound system, right?"

The reality is, if you 'cook a cable' all it's going to do is increase the internal resistance. Requiring more current to produce the same sound output. Which requires more amplification at the source. Which increases the line noise overall.

The, "lower noise floor and u can hear more deeply into the sound stage" was probably due to a combination of increased amplification and dampening of the mid-to-high frequency range.

People in digital audio forums debate what's a better sounding backup medium: CD-R or hard drive or Dropbox. They swear they can hear a difference. Yet the sha-1 hashes match.

And these are not dumb people; it just shows you what happens when you get a bunch of enthusiasts in a forum. By the time somebody steps in to say "huh?!" it's unstoppable.

I genuinely lol'd at your comment. That's amazing and slightly horrifying at the same time.

I wonder how many audio enthusiasts have actually had the privilege to hear music being made in a studio on proper studio monitors.

It kind of amazes me that, in the digital music age, the best quality streaming services have to offer is 320KBPS lossy compressed copies of CD quality audio.

Then there are people who think it takes so long for their DAC to reach the sweet spot after being powered on that they transport it to shootout on UPS so the unit only needs an hour to acclimate to its new environment. http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f6-dac-digital-analog-conv...

very convoluted writing, but I think the tl;dr is: initial burn-in is real, subsequent runs have no lasting effect

The article states "the enclosure has the dominant influence" and it's far greater than any measurable impact of the speakers. The worst-case change is an inaudible .09 dB difference.

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