Cable Break In for the Naysayers

Dielectrics and Break-In

This is not exotic physics here.

I make DIY "cores" applied at strategic positions on my vintage Western Electric cloth wire speaker cables to manage "treble noise." The core is not ferrite but is instead a ring of beads made of girasol quartz. It is astonishing what a difference in sound they can make which would seem to indeed suggest that what runs down the wires is not just internal to the wires.

Shunyata Cable Talk

Shunyata has some of the more elaborate explanations of their cable designs which I find compelling only because I really like their cables especially the Alpha XC's which I have added as feed cables to some older Shunyata power conditioners I got off of Ebay years ago. The difference these made to sound quality was palpable.

Vibroacoustics

Really, we are just babes-in-the-woods as regards music's effects on us. There is a much wider arena of influence that may explain our befuddlement with the differences we hear between scoped measurements and our perceptions.

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LIGO

"The LIGO project helps demonstrate that just because we do not have the tools to measure a phenomenon does not mean that phenomenon does not exist."

The elephant in the living - the gauge of the cable wiring. For instance, on my system running Cornwall 4"s - a high efficiency speaker - changing speaker cable gauge has obvious and logical impacts on sound. Going from 10 gauge "western electric" cable to 16 gauge "western electric" modifies the sound hugely. Granted, I am sort of cheating here but am I really? To pretend that cables are all anonymous, identical non-entities is just too silly.

Transmission Line/Waveguide

“My Silver, Palladium, and Fidelium cables were all designed from the transmission line or waveguide point of view that electricity flows between the conductors, not in the conductors. The energy is transmitted in the form of an electromagnetic wave.  Energy does, however, penetrate the metal conductor material and that portion of the energy becomes a secondary error or memory signal (time-delayed). 

The physics behind this suggests that the smaller or thinner the conductor is, the less time it will take for the electromagnetic wave to penetrate the conductor, thus resulting in a smaller timing error.  As you know, many cable manufacturers have evolved to produce cables with smaller and smaller wires to minimize what they describe as the skin effect.  Most of them, however, still view electricity flow as electrons inside the wire, like water in a pipe.  This is an analogy that does not allow or account for phase or group delay in a wire."

It is probable that cable break-in is most obvious on horn speakers given their sensitivity notoriously so in the treble regions. It is in the upper registers that my Klipsch Cornwall 4's demonstrate break-in most unequivocally. I never "adjust" to shrill highs. They either go away or I do, or rather the cable goes away.