"Cable break-in" is a clever excuse that expensive cable makers came up with. you don't find any audible difference just return it "next day" for a full refund before your brain wants to believe.
Cable Break In for the Naysayers
I still cannot believe that in this stage of Audio history there are still many who claim cable break in is imagined. They even go so far as claim it is our ears that break in to the new sound. Providing many studies in the way of scientific testing. Sigh...
I noticed such a recent discussion on the What’s Best Forum. So here is my response.
______________________________________________________________________________________________ I just experienced cable break in again firsthand. 10 Days ago, I bought a new set of the AudioQuest Thunderbird XLR 2M interconnects.
First impression, they sounded good, but then after about 30 hours of usage the music started sounding very closed in and with limited high frequencies. This continued until about 130 hours of music play time.
Then at this time, the cables started to open up and began to sound better and better each passing hour. I knew at the beginning they would come around because they sounded ok at first until the break in process started. But now they have way surpassed that original sound.
Now the soundstage has become huge with fantastic frequency extensions. Very pleased with the results. Scientifically I guess we can’t prove cable break in is real, but with good equipment, good ears, it is clearly a real event.
ozzy
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You certainly don’t require a nice HiFi system if you can’t hear the dramatic difference between my brand new Audioquest Dragon cords and my broken in demos of the same cords. To me the difference is blatantly obvious and my system took a dive with the new cords. But things have changed after a week. Still not where things were with the demo cords yet. Or maybe the evil scheming cable companies hand out superior cables for demos! There’s a new conspiracy theory. The one thing that the cable companies may be guilty of is charging about 4X what it should cost to achieve decent margins. But I’m just an armchair critic; maybe their costs really do back up their prices. But if so I’d be surprised. It’s their high prices that fuel all the conspiracy theories. A counter argument to my criticism of the high prices of audiophile grade cables is that if margins are truly over-inflated, then you’d expect that would create an opening for a giant killer company to swoop in and sell cables that perform like the very best at 25% of the cost. And yet this hasn’t happened. So maybe it can’t be done.
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@ozzy , how long did you find it took for your Dragon source cords to fully break in? I’m finding they seem to take longer than I recall my Hurricane cords taking. |
- 189 posts total