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RE: Many Times...

"Let me make a small correction - "there is no KNOWN scientific reason ..." We don't know everything, and specifically we don't know what we don't know.

My experience is that caps and transformers sound pretty bad at first, and in most cases 50 hours or so of music will resolve the problem."

I hear what you say, and I would certainly respect your opinion and beliefs. However, from my point of view I face a dilemma, for the following reasons. I personally am unable to hear any of the subtle effects that you and others speak of, when it comes to break-in of wires, joints, capacitors, resistors or whatever. I know my hearing is not very good, and so I could just put it down to my poor hearing.

On the other hand, as a scientist I am always naturally sceptical of claims, and I always like to make order-of-magnitude estimates of claimed effects, to try to judge whether they are plausible. On that basis, it has to be said that there do not, in general, seem to be plausible effects that are likely to be of sufficient magnitude to account for an audibly-different sound resulting from, say, a freshly-soldered joint versus a joint that has passed small audio currents for a few hundred hours. Likewise with a bit of interconnecting wire, or even a whole transformers-worth of wire. If there were such effects that could exceed the human threshold of audibility, they would easily be measurable by precision instruments. Unless someone can produce verifiable measurements that support the claim of audibility, I would have to remain sceptical.

Yet another point is that there are, on the other hand, extremely well documented experiments that indicate that the human brain is very easily tricked into "seeing" things that are not there, or not seeing things that are there, and likewise with other senses including hearing.

Thus for someone like me, who never has and never will be able to hear any of these alleged subtle effects for himself, an overwhelmingly more likely explanation for the seeming disconnect between the scientific implausibility of there being a real audible phenomenon and the apparent ease with which some people report hearing such effects is that what is going on is at the psycho-acoustic level rather than at the objective level. In other words, there seems to be very little scientific basis for claiming that the breaking in of wire or joints would lead to audible effects. But, on the other hand, there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that such effects may be "heard" by individuals, based, perhaps, upon their expectations. I don't doubt the sincerity of the person reporting the phenomenon, just as I don't doubt the sincerity of the person who watches the video of dancers on a stage and who swears blind that no gorilla walked across the stage during the performance. (I presume you have seen the video in question.) But unless there are genuine and rigorous double-blind listening tests that unambiguously demonstrate the audibility of the breaking-in of wire or joints, I personally find the psycho-acoustic explanations are much more plausible.

Chris

PS: I think Gargoyle makes an interesting point, about the curious fact that the "break-in" effects always seem to be for the better. Wouldn't that be a bit strange, for the changes always to be in the same direction? Unless, of course, they were psycho-acoustic in origin...

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