Cartridge "demagging"

We've heard significant improvements after playing the frequency sweeps on the Cardas test LP. They are meant to demag a system, and it seems unlikely to THIS liberal arts educated head that playing a frequency sweep could do any harm. Of course I also don't understand how playing a frequency sweep would demagnify anything, but I'll not second guess someone with the experience of Mr. Cardas!

In the interest of full disclosure, a friend of mine tried the Cardas sweeps on his sytem and heard no difference. Maybe I majored in voodoo?

No more confused than we are David. Both Paul and I clearly heard the improvements, yet you (and Joe) heard nothing. You've got way more experience than we do and I'm pretty sure you're not deaf, but you'd have to be deaf not to hear what we did. Presumably there are system-specific events going on.

It's by no means clear that de-magnification is what actually took place. I wonder if some other process didn't occur. Paul probably understands copper-based alloys at the molecular level as well as all but a handful of people in the country, but he has no theory for why playing that disk would necessarily de-magnify any trace elements in a copper coil.

It's not even clear that the improvements we heard were due to any change in our cartridge. The signal from the LP passes through another set of coils, in our speakers, not to mention all the components in between. Any one or more of them could have been affected.

I'm stickin' with juju, at least it was good juju.

Raul,
Just for your data points, our Shelter 901 had about 500-600 hours on it when we played the Cardas LP. It had started sounding a bit muffled, lifeless, lacking in dynamics. You know how the bass on the 901 sounds in cold weather if VTF is a bit too low? This was similar but all frequencies.

The Cardas LP's de-mag sweep woke everything up like a slap of after-shave on a sleepy face. We didn't change anything else, so it was either that record or magic beans! ;)

I've never tried it on another cartridge. Do you think it would do anything for a 20 year old ADC XLM?!