OP: I’m glad to hear some people tend to experience this problem, I believe and respect others do not hear it. The issue is I know personally I experience total loss of bloom, bass, spl or energizing of the room or what ever you would like to call it. All cables are many years old and fully broken in, ranging from JPS, Acoustic Zen, XLO Sig. and Harmonic Technology, so solid core, silver and copper.
millercarbon:
Yes handling cables ruins sound quality. Usually very short term, minutes to hours, but it all depends on the handling and the time.
Let me expand on that. There’s a sort of sound quality performance curve that as far as I can tell pretty much everything goes through. But its cyclical and fractal nature combined with not everyone being that great listeners, and more often than not psychologically disinclined as well, its not a thing a lot have picked up on. So let me explain.
You got one very long term cycle, which is performance from new to anywhere from a month or more of steady use. This cycle is big and obvious and bad enough many manufacturers spend time and money burning in before shipping. Even so, everyone knows to expect some time in use before full performance. Once burned in this cycle hits almost a plateau. Almost because long enough out of use and it restarts all over again. But it was a long time peaking, and its a long time going back. Cyclical, see?
Then there’s a much shorter term cycle, the one that happens every night if you turn your stuff off- or even if you don’t. If you do then you get the warm-up phase which can be minutes to hours or even days depending on your particular component. This is why so many SS components should just be left on all the time.
But even left on all the time there’s still the nightly cycle of sounding better and better as the night goes along, until dawn, and it starts to get crappy again, the whole cycle starting all over again that night.
Sorry if people think this is bunk. Or that its just more of the usual mindless repetition of blather heard or read or whatever. Its none of that. This is all stuff I noticed all by myself, same as the OP with his cables. Only I've had a lot more time to think about it. Like 30 years more time.
The one cycle that’s different is cables. Because unlike everything else they can be put off by just wiggling them around. If you could get inside your amp and wiggle all the wires around bet it would do just the same. Wires is wires.
Anyway, same as above. Slight brief wiggling, slight brief cycle reset. If you even are able to notice. Major moving around, coiling and storing and wriggling back into position, expect a major cycle reset.
One thing mentioned is cleaning connections is something I haven’t done in a year or so.
Yeah well you are way overdue then. Mine must have been cleaned fifty times and at least a dozen different ways over the years which is how I know you are overdue. You could at this point wipe with ordinary alcohol and cloth and hear a big improvement. In fact you should try something just like that just to see for yourself.
Right now I am working on doing a thorough review and evaluation of Perfect Path Solutions Total Contact. TC has been around for a while but its gone through different editions and it seems no one yet has given this anywhere near the quality level review it deserves. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
If some believe removing cables need time to recover sonicly how can you judge adding or subtracting cables to improve things when the benefits or down falls take a few days to hear.
Well its true, and it isn’t. Its true because, well one time Definitive let me audition a Linn phono stage, but only overnight. So I get home and of course its cold and sounds like crap. Even after a couple hours, pure crap. They wanted it back by 9AM and I almost boxed it right up but decided to leave it on overnight. Next day, it was like a completely different animal. Not for me, but at least now I could understand how it might be, for someone.
But it isn’t true, because a) that’s rare and b) its hours not months and c) its a known known. I know it happens. Even better, I know the fundamental character of the component always comes through even right out of the box.
Its natural to be asking questions because this is all mind-blowing and new right now. I can still recall, though back when I went through it there wasn’t even an internet to find anyone to share it with. There was like, one guy, literally one guy. Why there are still all these years later people wandering around pretending these things aren’t happening, playing their own little part in preventing what should be common knowledge from becoming common, that to me is the real question.