"Burn-in is simply a bad term for it. It seems far better to call it a gradual cooling off or tapering down of existing florescence due to a reduction in ambient radioactive high-energy particle bombardment. Cables do this too when used. When current runs through a wire, it forms a magnetic field around it. This is a force field which guides some portion of the constantly existing cosmic radiation around the copper, thus to some small extent protects it. You can see the particles indirectly in a cloud chamber as the vapor ionizes and forms bubble tracks. Even 10 brass plates each 13mm thick do not stop these particles. The following video illustrates this.
"So running current through a wire provides conditions whereby over time, copper’s already absorbed radioactivity can cool off in the form of radiation through a slew of fundamental particle interactions. Hence cable burn in and system warm up are really complete misnomers. The protection offered by magnetic fields allows cables and gear to cool off a bit. We recently had a scheduled visit from the local fire safety commission for which we had to prepare the workshop to adhere to all the safety standards as set forth by law. In preparation we went out and bought the prerequisite smoke detectors. We hadn't yet installed them but already brought them into the lab system room. This coincided with the first introduction of some unrelated R&D experiments. The very first connection of the newly finished R&D prototypes disappointed. Only a bit later did we realize that we had inadvertently added new sources of active nuclear radiation to the listening environment. This led to initially mixed feelings about their performance when all prior tests had led to an expectation of clearly improved sonics. At first we didn't associate the two events. We realized what had happened when we removed the smoke detectors and clearly heard the very familiar positive effects over a period of about two hours. The addition of those new smoke detectors had masked our performance. It obviously had nothing to do with the smoke detectors being turned on or off. They radiate fundamental particles all the time due to the radioactive material's decay in and of itself."
Hello comments cue of radioactive decays. The Never-ending Story was written by Michael Ende. His last name literally means 'finish' so ending. Recorded decays have their own natural ending in the noise floor of our room and system. If we lower either, they simply linger longer to feel more languorous. They just won't be never-ending. Neither was my story with the RCA Entropic Process. I didn't have a non-processed version to comment on their differences. I had our vintage Crystal Cable twisted coaxial silver with molecular gold infusion.
After three days of continuous signal on the newbies, that difference was easily pegged. It didn't rely on endless comparisons. The end was in sight rather quickly. It was all in and on about slower-ending decays. It made tails not heads. It wasn't about the start of tones—our hifi vocabulary calls that their leading edge, attack or transient—but trailing edges. That made the RCA EP a story of endings, their author one Liudas Motekaitis as the Lithuanian original of the anglicized Louis Motek at the helm of LessLoss.
Hifi discourse is heavy with mentions of tonal balance as the relative weighting of treble, midrange and bass. Those are artificial divisions of the audible spectrum into three equal bands. They occur in the vertical domain so happen simultaneous. At its most basic, imagine a chord of three notes spread widely across a few octaves. If the lowest tone plays loudest, we call the tonal balance bassy or bottom up. If the top note plays loudest, we call it bright, forward or top-down illuminated. If the central tone is loudest, we call it midrange-y, if all are equally loud, balanced.
Hifi discourse is far more sparse on mentions of a textural balance in the horizontal domain of time. It too applies three artificial divisions called attack, sustain and fade. Weighted on the attack, we might call the sound edge of seat, precisely timed, articulate or snappy. Weighted on the fade, we could call it laid back, elastic, softer and warmer. Like deliberately wet water colors, the trails of multiple sounds intermingle. Zones of overlap broaden so sharp-edged separation diminishes. If the sound is heaviest on the sustain portion, we'd likely call it particularly robust and substantial.
So it's not just tonal balance which can and does shift whenever we change gear especially speakers. The textural balance can and will, too. How well we can make that out also depends on our room's acoustic reverb behavior. The lengthier its built-in echo, the more it dominates recorded decays. Musicians are always sensitive to the acoustics of their performance venues. Playing outdoors without assist of reflective boundaries creates far leaner textures. Playing a reverb-laden church beautifies even thin nasal timbres. The oldest trick in the recording cook book is adding artificial reverb to a wispy singer. He/she goes from skinny to sultry with the turn of a control. Listeners who despise solid-state's generally more 'front-loaded' transient not decay weighting may deliberately pull that balance deeper into the decay portion with tubes.
