Chris, it really didn't help for you to delete your posts since they were so heavily quoted throughout this thread. It's kind of like nails that you wish you hadn't driven. You can pull them, but the holes are still going to be there.
Unfortunately, it's hard to disagree with others in a public forum without sounding like an ass to some of the people who disagree with you. (And no, I'm not calling you an ass. I'm just saying that it's hard to disagree with others without some of them thinking you're an ass.) And while we're on the subject, I don't think you're an ass. (Of course, I agree with you, so that might be influencing my opinion of you.
)
It's been my experience that the only thing that's harder to discuss than politics, culture and religion is audio equipment. People can be unreasonably offended when you question their equipment choices. We all know what types of commitment people have to their own particular choices in mics. Apparently choice of cables carries that same level of what I consider to be irrational commitment.
But then again, I'm a cheap bastard. My goal in equipment is to get good enough performance from my gear that you can't tell the difference between my recordings and the recordings of the high end stuff and at about 1/10th the price. I want to believe that some moderately cheap cables produce results are virtually indistiguishable from the results you'd get with über expensive cables. I have a good theoretical background in the analysis and design of transmission lines, filters and amplifiers, so I tend to look at cables in terms of their distributed capacitance, inductance and resistance and how those things affect that signals that pass through them. I also know that at audio frequencies, things like current bunching and skin effect produce real, predictable, measurable, but insignificant effects for all but the longest cable runs.
Are the high end cables better? Probably. Can you tell the difference? Maybe, but I've never been able to, or at least I've rationalized the use of my cheap cables by not really trying hard to tell the difference. You say that you'd love to be proved wrong. Not me! I'd hate it because then I'd have to buy expensive cables in order to be satisfied that I was doing an adequate job of recording.
But that's not what this thread is about. It's about the notion that cables somehow get better with use. I can't adequately express how preposterous that seems to me. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that something changes about the cables, but no one seems to be able to say exactly what that something is. I definitely believe that there are people that are convinced that the burn-in effect is real and actually, I tend to agree. What we don't agree on is this: People who believe in burn-in believe that it's the cables that change. What I believe is that people's opinion of their cables change with time and the cables remain unchanged. If anything, I believe that the cables actually get worse with time just due to wear and tear on the plating on the contacts, but the change is so small as to be insignificant until the contact plating actually wears through and you start getting shot noise and intermittent continuity in your signal path.
So, let's do the tests. I'm still needing about 5 to 10 seconds of high quality audio to use in the tests. I've got lots of 16 bit material that I think is pretty good, but this burn-in effect, if it even exists, is probably going to be more subtle than the quantization error in a 16 bit recording. I'm not even sure that the quantization noise in a 24 bit recording will be sufficiently low for you to be able the hear the difference between a used cable and a new one. Let me know if you have a clip that you think will be good enough to reveal the difference between new and burned-in cables. The sooner we choose an adequate recording, the sooner we can reach an agreement and quit antagonizing Chris.
