Audiophiles for years – excuse the pun – have heard cable manufacturers’ and experts’ claims of “cable break-in.” It’s a huge, ongoing debate, though most seem to believe it’s folly. In the guitar world, I haven’t heard of this from cable manufacturers; at least from the brands I buy. But I have heard it from seemingly well-informed musicians who claim they can hear the difference between a broken-in cable and a brand new cable. These people pride themselves on their “golden ears,” and often pull rank by providing their “bonafides” of degrees or what-not to add credibility to their claims. They are so convincing that lots of uninformed, unsuspecting musicians fall prey to their claims and in turn take them as scientific fact. Then in turn spend hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars on super, high-end cables that they’ll “break in,” and magically, their tone will be right. Hey! More power to ’em.
Me? I won’t mince words: I think they’re full of shit.
There is no scientific basis for cable break-in. It’s purely subjective. And with cable manufacturers who make the claim that their cables sound better after they’ve been broken in, to me it’s all just pure marketing bullshit. But some of these “pundits” and their sycophants (I love that word) will bring Einstein into the equation with the following quote:
Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.
I dig that quote! But then it just points back to the subjectivity of cable break-in. Note that NONE of these so-called experts have ever provided numbers behind their claims. But they’ll take it further with an argument that it’s not the wire, but the insulation that breaks in; that is, the molecules of the dieletric will align to the signal over time. I _might_ buy this for a constant, uniform signal, but audio signals are random, plus the signal’s AC outside of any device in your chain. And again, they don’t have numbers to back this up. Molecules lining up to a random signal? If you buy into that, I have a couple of rental properties in Indiana I’d like to sell you (that’s actually true, and I’m trying to unload, er, sell them).
As I always advise, do your homework and find out for yourself. If you can hear those differences – though most everyone claims they’re psychological as opposed to physical – then I commend you on your auditory acuity. But my question, dear readers – especially for us regular joes – is this: If us mere mortals can’t hear that difference, does it really matter?
Guitar Gear 
I’m actually Glad you brought this one up as I am about to open a “cable break in” shop. Where, one can either pay a small fee to have his/her cables broken in by high or low current electronic devices, depending on the type of cable, or they can trade in their crappy new ones for ones that are already broken in..
Company motto
“As Broke As YOU Need To Be”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! TOO FUNNY!!! I can’t believe people actually are foolish enough to send their cables to these services. It costs something like $25 per cable. Oh well…
Wait a minute… There’s actually companies that do that… Here I thought I was gonna be a pioneer in the industry…
Maybe my electronics background has tainted me but that sounds a little silly. I do however believe that those folks actually believe it works. When Eric Johnson says he hears a clear difference, they I’ll think about believing
Indeed-i-do! Check this out: http://www.morrowaudio.com/breakinservice.htm. I laughed out loud when I saw this. There are even machines that purportedly do this! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Here is a good read for any techies out there
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm
BTW I think guitar string work with a very limited frequency from about 84Hz to just over 1.5kHz not including harmonics.
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/music/musical-note-frequencies.htm
All I care about cables is that they do not drop the signal much. I do know if they are of very poor quality they will kill the highs due to Capacitive losses as if you turned the tone control down. But I have yet to see a cable 10 feet or shorter that shows any difference from brand to brand including Monster cables. The connectors and strain reliefs at the ends and the solder joints on the connectors is where I see the most problems.
Want to add a little color to your cable get a curley cable for that early sixties sound, takes a little harshness off the highs.
Happy New
Perused the Roger Russell site. Great information!!! Lots of snake oil in cable sales! 🙂
Loved this thread. I find the whole cable issue to be hysterical. First, if the molecules of the dielectric piece of the equation somehow “align”, then you need a new dielectric. The definition of dielectric is an insulator, which by definition, is not affected by the adjacent current. Second, if you’re worried about conducting your signal, just use good, well-known conductive metals such as good old fashioned copper (as long as the copper is thick enough for the current – hence the different gauges of wire): an excellent conductor of electrons (or holes), and inexpensive to boot (no secret it’s used so extensively in every conceivable fashion for conducting electrical current). Of course there are better metals one can use such as gold, which is one of the best conductors on the planet, but of course prohibitively expensive to use. My $0.02. 🙂
[…] In my last post on cables, one of the respondents replied with a couple of great links. One of them was to Roger Russell’s site on a discussion about speaker wire. In that article, he had a very useful table on wire gauges and maximum cable lengths you should use. I grabbed the table, reformatted it for GuitarGear.org. Here’s the table: […]