It really depends on the cable. I have had cables that break in had little to no impact. Yet with others they sounded close off when first plugging them in and after 100+ hours they opened up quite a bit.
Does Power Cord Require Burn-In To Sound Good?
I recently bought a new power cord but there isn’t much difference in sound quality between this new cord and the previous Wireworld Elektra 7 which it replaces. The cords are used on the DAC.
Any ideas if the cord needs to burn in to open up and sound better? It currently has about 5 hours on it and I think I prefer the sound quality of the previous cord which costs 10 times cheaper.
Any thoughts appreciated.
Any ideas if the cord needs to burn in to open up and sound better? It currently has about 5 hours on it and I think I prefer the sound quality of the previous cord which costs 10 times cheaper.
Any thoughts appreciated.
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@twoleftears said it well.. I agree, Money is better spent elsewhere, especially the room and speakers.. A well designed and sized power cord doesn’t need to cost a fortune to function well.. Some folks use badly designed cables to coverup a much larger system issue or deficiencies. After everything is sorted out, then cables is a place to go and bleed money. |
Power supply...POWER SUPPLY...((((POWER SUPPLY)))) - in short: Transformers. Think Peter Dahl. Then, capacitors, quality (tolerance) of resistors and adherence to tolerance in support of the circuit topology of your choice in class of service; i.e., Class A —> Class D and SS v Tubes. Money is best spent there. If you have accomplished that, then by all means buy a $5👀K Power Cord. You might hear a difference and assuage your expenditure on wire. 👍🏿 |
By jhills: "My advice: If you bought a $5K amp and it doesn't sound good with the cord it came with, but you think supplying it with a $5K power cord will make it sound great - save your $5K and buy an amp. that has a decent power supply and sounds great with the cord it comes with....Jim." I have to say, this is the most lucid summary on this topic. Well stated. I'd like to add: buy a better amp for the difference in money when that difference is greater than 15% of the cost of the device itself, if you feel the compulsion to upgrade. I sunk my money into the cost of the devices. I also second: power supply to support circuit topology and build quality. |
Take a deep breath, be open, be inquisitive, hold a modest amount of skepticism with unproven assertions, be careful opening your wallet, but also question current scientific tenets and limits because life is full of experiences that are valid yet unexplainable. Many, many respected audio designers and manufacturers willingly admit that science gets an idea part of the way to reality and then listening and tweaks beyond current logic fine tune many of the finest products we love to listen to. Science, alchemy, dumb luck, and art are all relevant. Don’t kid yourself. Don’t be so rigid, to think you can no more prove than disprove. If you believe your brain and your ears can be tricked, this cuts both ways. I am more then willing to give up a portion of my fortune to be continually tricked into being so caught up in a musical performance out of my HiFi that I momentarily quit thinking about the gear and all the crap and politics coming from folks that are so full of shiit that they feel the need to defecate all over the rest of us who are just enjoying our selves. And bye the way, on my kit and with my ears, I hear warm up, burn in, settling, and all kinds of other seemingly psychedelic phenomena. Everything counts. Everything is in play. Happy Listening! [|;^)> |
This is an open ended question, as a manufacturer I know what my customers tell me. While a quality cable will show an immediate change, burn in time will show additional changes. It can be as short as 5 hours or as long as 100 hours. The changes are usually in openness, bottom end and sound stage, and brightness can soften over time. In general there is a minimum of 10 hours before you should even start to develop an opinion. As an example, our Interconnects are all over the place in the first 50 hours, then they start to settle down and do what they are supposed to. There are to many variables to say just how long a burn in time should be. But that's my 2 cents... |
Well what I think is that burn in is not enough. I put a heat strip around my power cables to maintain a minimum of 150 degrees F. If you do not do this the burn in reverts to unburn in and then you are back to square one. If you ever let your power cable temp drop below 150F the degradation to your fidelity is quite pronounced. Also you need to keep your power cables suspended above and off any hard heat absorbing surfaces. There is a tendency for the side of your heat stripped cable adjacent to the heat absorbing surface to be a bit cooler. This can cause there to be an unbalanced audio signal which can be quite distracting. Carpet is OK for a contact surface for instance where an oak floor is not. I also recommend that your heated power cable be sheltered from AC ducts in the summer for the same reason. You can never be to careful when the finest outcomes in audio are what you not only strive for but demand. |
Clarification: Most amps, pre-amps CPDs and DACs do sound better after a period of warm up (usually 20 - 30 min. for tubed gear and sometimes several hours for SS gear) and most equipment will sound marginally better after a period of break in - hours, not hundreds of hours. So the above statement is assuming that the amp is a good match with your other devices and speaker load and has been adequately warmed up and broken in itself....Jim |
Why is that people with a grudge and an agenda masquerade as audiophiles and get their sadistic kicks haunting and trolling audiophile sites? To, of course, balance all the unscientific, unproven, useless bull crap that is put out on this forum by questionable sources and to protect the newbie from seeing only the bull crap. Sorta like walking by a guy beating on a woman and doing nothing about it. On the other hand.... who praises the significant, if not impressive, improvements in sound quality that can be achieved by buying very expensive "high end” cables? Two groups. Those that manufacture, distribute and sell these products at a serious profit and those who were talked into drinking the Kool Aid and would NEVER fess up to being fleeced. Actually there is a third group. This group gulped the Kool Aid and are victims of the insidious audio expectation bias that causes you to hear the advertised, albeit impossible, sound quality enhancement. |
How power influences the sound depends upon the equipment: The power supply in an amplifier could do so thorough a job of filtering out noise along with hum that it might make power conditioning irrelevant. If you use single ended triode amplification it will always draw the same current rather than demand more current for loud passages in a recording and the resistance of a less expensive power cord will be trivial. Higher audio frequencies are easier to filter out than 60 Hz hum and many vacuum tubes have cutoff frequencies at higher radio frequencies. Watch out for the placebo effect for cables in general. There is some junk science used to market audio. |
It is not a matter of "So says you". Simple fact, that so many of his claims are wrong or unsubstantiated. He should stop his rants long enough to realize that AD is Analog Devices and still very much in business. BB and LTC were just purchased by larger competitors and the the sub is often better than the pieces. |
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Respected recording engineer who has published a lot of nonsense like that silly test at RF of cables with Kimber and tries to claim it applies to audio (showing technical ignorance), or his claims to have eliminated masking from loud sound ( I call bull), or to raise tinnitus inducement by 30db (bull). I love his rants on crosstalk in op amps which I don't dispute but claims the audio is triangle waves internally is not accurate, and at best implementation and op amp dependent. Convenient to invite the variable and huge crosstalk in the predominant at the time vinyl playback. My favorite though is probably claiming electronics can ameliorate room issues. And proof of his claims ... |
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Because the definition of an "audiophile" is subjective. Often, an audiophile is one who says: "...and if I spend that much money I KNOW it will sound better!Why is it the fallback position on practically any debate or argument on cables is one of a binary nature, that being, obscenely priced cables vs. zip cord, when it was never brought up to begin with? Is that all you've got? Maybe I should have qualified it by asking it this way: Why is that people with a grudge and an agenda masquerade as audiophiles and get their sadistic kicks haunting and trolling audiophile sites? Here's a excerpt of a link from a very well respected recording engineer on what he terms HLO (hard lined objectivists): https://www.stereophile.com/content/spectral-x-contamination-problems-op-amp-chips-hard-line-objectivists The whole article is worth a read as the main thrust of it (problems in op amp chips) allies to all aspects of audio reproduction in All the best, Nonoise |
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Again I ask: why do anti-audiophiles post on an audiophile site?Because the definition of an "audiophile" is subjective. Often, an audiophile is one who says: "...and if I spend that much money I KNOW it will sound better!"
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Res Ipsa Loquitur is both a latin truism and a legal term describing certain accepted situations where negligence is implied without further proof. If the situation qualifies, it is a persuasive tool in proving a case. On the other hand, the generic use of the term is less useful in mounting a persuasive argument. Res Ipsa Loquitur in a non-legal context is best thought of as the historic precursor to the modern day truism "it is what it is," the use of which is often accompanied by a smug smile or mike drop (after all, who can argue with that?) While a latin phrase is perceived to add gravitas to an argument, the use of the phrase adds nothing substantive to the argument. It certainly doesn't end it. Perhaps the parties should just "agree to disagree"........... |
Res Ipsa Loquitur is both a latin truism and a legal term describing certain accepted situations where negligence is implied without further proof. If the situation qualifies, it is a persuasive tool in proving a case. On the other hand, the generic use of the term is less useful in mounting a persuasive argument. Res Ipsa Loquitur in a non-legal context is best thought of as the historic precursor to the modern day truism "it is what it is," the use of which is often accompanied by a smug smile or mike drop (after all, who can argue with that?) While a latin phrase is perceived to add gravitas to an argument, the use of the phrase adds nothing substantive to the argument. It certainly doesn't end it. Perhaps the parties should just "agree to disagree"........... |
You know what happens when we were recording and we detected a faulty power cord? We replaced it then shut the studio down for 2 weeks. Sorry bit of professional humor. We replaced it. No one noticed. Usually it was replaced due to damage/safety not actually failing and we replaced with new. Generally heavy duty as they took a lot of abuse. Then again could be just that the artist forgot the power cord to their amp, synth, etc. Never once do I remember them insisting they had to run/fly home and get their own cord (or let it sit for several days). Now obviously recording and playback are not the same but the people who make your music don’t fret over this, don’t even give it a thought actually (except hum and noise). For live recordings the equipment including orders of magnitude more sensitive microphone cables were probably set up that day or if lucky the day before and no one gave any thought to the power cords on mic preamps, mixer boards, amps, etc. Oh, contacts ... That's where problems existed most of the time. Contact cleaner/enhancer is your friend and sometimes tools to fix a bent pin. |
@audio2design- "Not sure who you think you are fooling with this?" "....with some hard numbers what your claimed dielectric impacts would be on a power cord....." Are you actually that obtuse? I’ve, "claimed" nothing (hence: nothing to prove). I’ve only pointed out that POSSIBILITIES exist, regarding those scientifically established (measurable and repeatable) changes that dielectrics go through, when an electric field is introduced. Obviously; you’ve a serious problem with comprehension. Then again: it’s probably that fevered, religious fervor, that has has your uneducated brain in turmoil. |
I actually sort of envy people who can't tell the difference between lamp cord and a given $1500 power cable. Fortunately for me, I can't seem to tell the difference between the $1500 and the $5000 cable (except the price) of the same brand and similar construction. I guess you can count me as a reluctant believer that cables (and yes, break-in) might make a difference for you. Just listen and decide for yourself. I say might, because what struggling through this pathetic thread illustrates is that many people can't - or perhaps won't - hear the difference. And they're apparently pissed off about it. (The Cable Company will let you borrow cables to try so that you don't get stuck with something you can't use and can't return. And I'm just a happy customer of theirs, no business interest.) |
This is purely my own experience and it may drastically differ from yours. In my experience power cables do have a burn-in period, it is real, it lasts several hundreds of hours, sometimes much less, but they don’t change dramatically, the changes in fact are very small (apart from a mandatory short period of a temporary "lost bass" with some cables, why on earth does it happen, I have no idea, but it almost always does. Saying that, with some cables/systems I can hear no changes at all). The sound signature is here from the start, and the new cable should sound great from the word go, just give it half an hour to settle. If it does not, then don’t waste your time hoping for a miracle and trying to convince yourself that it is getting better. P.e. if you think that the voices are thin, there is not enough body, or there is too much bass, or sibilance etc. etc. no burn-in will change it. You may somehow adjust to it and start believing that it is better now, but you won’t fool yourself for more than a very brief period, eventually it will leave you disappointed. You need to bear in mind 4 factors that can affect the sound during the burn-in: 1. The physical changes in the cable that do affect the sound (don’t ask) 2. Power line/supply quality fluctuations that may make your system sound better/worse 3. Cold/warm condition of your gear 4.Your own condition and your hearing/adjusting to the new sound: first the differences pop up, you hear something new and concentrate on these new details and accents, then it blends with the whole pic and you can’t recognise it as easily if at all, and after a while the new balance/signature starts revealing itself with different kinds of recordings and you realise that yes there is a difference that matters. At this stage you put the old cable back and immediately recognise the old familiar sound signature that was gone with the new one. That’s how it almost always works with me. YMMV. |
Burn in is necessary. Do not judge the cable after 5 hours. Wait 200 hours and decide. You will find that it will fluctuate and the bass will settle last. I found burn in required for every new component. In addition cables needs settling in. If I remove my cables and re connect after a few hours I need to wait at least 24 hours |
Not sure who you think you are fooling with this? It’s obvious you don’t have a physics or eng background. If you did you would calculate and clearly communicate , with some hard numbers what your claimed dielectric impacts would be on a power cord supplied by a source (AC line) with a source impedance at audio frequencies of about 0.5 ohm. You won’t do that though as that would take the exact knowledge you claim others don’t have. rodman999994,822 posts12-12-2020 12:14am@audio2design- I’m absolutely certain (experientially); you’re absolutely wrong. Yours is simply another uninformed, Naysayer Doctrine adherent’s assumption. Now: deny the possibilities, offered by the facts presented. |
It's one less thing to worry about for multi market and makes for easier MFG. Only need really design for 2 or 3 voltages but way more cord ends. dill1,366 posts12-11-2020 10:22pm" So they can make one model for all markets." |
I am pretty certain that the person who wrote this has no formal education, physics , engineering or otherwise related but is obviously making a failed attempt to insult those that do.
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