opaqueice;151350 Wrote: > Look at it this way - we know a tremendous amount about cables. (FYI > there is no such thing as a dialectric - if you mean dielectric, that > is the opposite of a conductor, and if it formed in your interconnects > or speaker cables it would have a rather drastic and unsubtle effect on > the sound. Fortunately for electronics it does not.) We know very well > how electrons propagate down cables, we have literally billions of > electronic devices behaving in precisely predictable ways all the time > everywhere in the world - it's hard to think of anything we understand > BETTER. And in all of that, there is not a shred of scientific > evidence or theory, at least to my knowledge (which is considerable - > I'm a physicist), which indicates that any such phenomenon exists. I > can say with total condidence that if cable burn-in happens it must be > a miniscule effect. > > On the other hand while we understand very little about how the human > ear and brain interact, we know for a fact that the placebo effect and > perception adaptation effects exist (and are extremely strong). > > So which is more plausible - something going against decades of > scientific knowledge, experience, experiments, expertise, and the laws > of nature, or something in total accord with common sense and many many > experiments in medicine and psychology and the study of human > perception. You decide.
<donning asbestos suit now> Opaqueice, FWIW I'm with you on this one! The brain definitely burns in...I doubt that copper does. Speakers do for reasons stated above - anything mechanical needs to bed-in. The burn-in used in scientific/engineering circles seems to relate mostly to caps "forming" (or components going in/out of spec due to thermal issues) which is well-understood scientific phenomena. Some previous posters to this thread might do well to distinguish between "audiophiles" and people with a "good ear". Sadly there is no evidence for a correlation between the two... <flame suit "reinforced to the nines"> Please don't try and tell me that I can't hear stuff and you can. Hearing (like seeing, smell and taste) is 99% in the brain. Touch is 100% in the brain... We can try and rationalise it all we want but at the end of the day we are dealing with perception not logic/science. <flame suit set to "armegeddon"> Thankfully for the industry, perception remains a delightfully elusive and subjective beast... <flame suit notched up to 11> :0) -- Phil Leigh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29025 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
