Breaking in questions about Cardas cables

Settling interconnects by shutting down your amp and running your tuner through the powered up preamp will work fine. When I am settling new cables, I simply leave my tuner on at moderate levels while I'm away and at low or listening levels when I'm home...for 200 hours straight! In fact, if you aren't using tube gear, I recommend leaving all solid state gear powered up 24/7. In most cases, this amounts to leaving a 100 watt bulb on all the time. I'm still using gear that has been on 24/7 for over 8 years, with very little down time.

If you've ever experienced those swings between your gear sounding good on some days and not so good on others, leave it on and this will all but disappear.

Hi Terry,
It's been my practice not to over think the process too much. Just play the stereo. If you wanted to off-tune the tuner to get hiss through it, you could wire the speakers out of phase from each other (only change the positive to negative leads on one speaker) and then, place them toe-to-toe. This will allow you to turn them up a little but being out of phase and looking at each other will cancell a great deal of the noise out (and volume). In this way, you could leave them running while you are out of the house and this will move them along in being burned-in. One thing on burned in Cardas cables, you don't really want to move them around once you break them in. Really. Here is a link to the Cardas webste where Mr.Cardas addresses the brun-in process. Check out the 9th paragraph down. Having dealt with Cardas cables for many years, I had heard about this early on. http://www.cardas.com/content.php?area=insights&content_id=12&pagestring=Cable+Break-In

Happy reading and good luck with your new cables!

Dan