What is meant by burn-in time?

Most new cable (be it interconnect or speaker cable) tends to have a slightly bright tonal balance and a tendency to affect the timing or coherence of a piece of music. With use these traits will diminish and ultimately disappear. How much difference this will make to the final performance and how long this will take to happen varies from cable to cable. Our own research shows that the design of and the materials used to construct the cable will influence the degree of change.

There is logic to this: cables designed to be revealing will show a greater degree of change, it will be more noticeable because you can hear more. Cables that use silver and Teflon in their construction will exhibit a more marked change than cables that use copper and polyethylene.

We have also gathered a lot of information with regard to the time it takes for a cable to reach its full performance potential within a system. As a general rule and assuming that the system is used for three to four hours a day, most of the changes will occur over the first three to four weeks. It is possible to speed this up. You can do this by leaving a CD player on repeat (fine for interconnects, but if you are burning in speaker cable you may need understanding and tolerant neighbours). Playing music with a lot of high frequency energy also seems to play a part in reducing burn-in time. Some retailers offer a cable burn-in service and although there may be a small charge for this it is a very quick solution.