Interconnect cable upgrade disapointment

Seems like the original poster has already gone down the path of depending on someone else's subjective listening experience - the result is reflected in the subject line of the thread "interconnect cable upgrade dissapointment" - I doubt that he or she will make that same mistake twice.

The break in time is determined by how long it takes you to believe that there is a change. This is because there is no actual change between 1 minute and 2000 hours of use. Change likely will occur after many years, decades, centuries, or millenia due to disintegration of the materials.

Whatever you paid for the cables seems to me to just be tuition for a good lesson - that if the people posting who have scientific backgrounds point to the lack of proof of any meaningful gain from a product, and if the only place that does point to a meaninful gain are the manufacturers - while the non audiophile community pretty much looks at the justification as on par with aliens, ufo's, and the Yeti (which they do) then there may be more to that viewpoint than to the "it just sounds better" viewpoint of those who are selling the product or who are trying to justify their purchases to themselves.

It should just be common sense that the 'break in' for cables is just more of the same, kind of like warming up the ouiji board for better spirit contact because it takes time, depending on atmospheric conditions, to form the invisible ectoplasm pathway. Of course, the tuition has only been well spent if the lesson has been learned.

Douglas schroeder: As to the reduction in vibration - I did not state that I was trying to improve the sound - you seem to have assumed that. What I did state was that I was seeking to reduce the transmission of energy caused by the floor - speaker interface. My reason was, not to change the quality of the sound, but to cut down on the inefficiency caused by loss of energy through that interface.

However, the arguments proposed for cable improvements do not rest in scientific theory, at least not scientific theory that has application at the frequencies and current levels present in home audio.

Seems like I have touched a nerve - do I detect one with a pecuniary interest in cables? And no, I won't be joining you on the cable adventure - I have heard the cable argument for going on 20 years and it is as meritless today as it was 20 years ago.

Blindjim - the handle comes from the title of a book written fairly recently about 20th century 'classical' music "The Rest is Noise" which happened to be in front of me on the bookshelf when I selected my moniker for this forum.

Additionally - one thing I would like to point out - although not directed toward Blindjim but to the comments from another poster about reducing vibration - my goal with vibration reduction is not to improve sound quality - what prompted my interest, aside from inefficiencies, is I do not want to "feel" the music when I listen with my feet on the floor. If you look further down my post with regard to vibration damping you will see some reference to that effect, which occurs when at high volumes. To the extent that I can get rid of that effect, is the purpose for the damping system. I don't expect a change in quality of the sound from the damping of the floor-speaker effect.

I thought I would take a second to correct some of the last poster's inaccuracies, for the benefit of the original poster, so that the original poster can evaluate the recommendations to the extent that future choices are made. As to experience and training, I built my first ham radio and put up my first tower decades ago as a teenage. In other words I have been connecting parts of electronic systems for a long time with great success. I learned more than a bit about electronics from years as an amateur radio operator, from repairing aviation weapons control systems and radar in the USN, from an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, from decades working as a biomedical engineer in research designs and clinical applications, decades as a member of the IEEE, and many years teaching electronics both in the classroom and in the laboratory at a technical college part time in the evenings.

Amplifiers are amplifiers, frequency response is frequency response, interconnects between equipment do not 'know' what the signal is - whether it represents music, a nerve conduction potential, or the output of a radar receiver, is immaterial to the interconnecting cable. What is important in determining selections in such interconnections is an understanding of the frequency and time domain characteristics of the signal and the electrical properties of the interconnected devices. In other words, there is nothing particularly special about moving signals around in a an audio system. So, I present my opinion in these matters from a considerable background pertinent to the topic. As to comparing cables by listening to them, I cannot say that I have extensively engaged in that practice, - however, there simply isn't a lot of value to be assigned to such subjective unquantifiable endeavors, if there were we would likely see a large number of studies of the results published in professional journals.

As a sidelight, a trademark of a weak argument is the ad hominem attack. A trademark of a weak argument in a scientific or technical area is the extent to which the opinion relies on subjectivity without objective findings, relies on other than logic, and is presented in emotional terms, as these are of no relevance to technical subjects. When the original poster decides what probative weight to assign to the various opinions, he or she may wish to take into consideration these factors.