Initial disappointment with 1st set of “expensive’ IC’s...


I’ve been slow working my way to equipping my rig with all Cardas as I’ve been fan of their quality/sound signature an for a long time. I just received 2 sets of Clear Light IC’s which I’m using DAC to Pre and Pre to Amp. up until now all other Cardas cables that I have were obtained used and sounded great from day 1. The Clear Light however are brand new..when I sat down to give them a listen I was surprised not to hear any improvement...I was actually disappointed to hear what I can describe as a fatter bass and subdued upper end. My prior IC’s were Shirokazu Yazaki Belden 8402. I admittedly do not have golden ears but the difference was obvious. I’m interested to hear what other Cardas owners have to say about how their cables sounded when 1st installed. 
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Showing 1 response by millercarbon

Burn in is real. Huge difference. BUT nothing ever goes from crap to magic. Does not happen. What does happen, stuff that sounds really good right from the first minute opens up and fills out and sounds way better as time goes by, sometimes even continuing to improve well into a hundred hours or more.

By and large though people saying you need to wait 100 hours are blowing smoke. Like I said, it sounds good right out of the box, or it doesn’t. The sow’s ear never does become a silk purse.

Right now you are listening and paying attention to some tiny little subset of a very long list of audio attributes. When you have heard a couple dozen, or hundred, things burn in, to the point you are able to see the pattern, get back to us then.

There is no such thing as diminishing returns. The grain of truth that confuses and misleads people is that sometimes you can find one thing that is so good it costs a freaking fortune to get even a tiny little bit better. Townshend F1 cables for example, or Herron VTPH2A phono stage. There are any number of examples like this, and at just about any price level too.

But saying that is to miss the forest for the trees. There is also rubber bands that will isolate cables and improve sound and cost zero. So where are the diminishing returns? If you see diminishing returns, all that is telling you is you are looking in the wrong place.