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

128x128ozzy

nyev,

I find that most quality cables take about 200 hours to breakin. The Dragon included. They are awesome and you will enjoy them!

Congrats!

ozzy

I always buy it used then it's already broken in even if it's speakers.thats immediate gratifaction.hope it's not an imitation.the real deal

@classicrockfan - The fallacy in your argument is that if cable break-in is real the marketing around cable break-in absolutely would make sense. Because of this, I don’t consider this a compelling argument.

 

i would like to see a system setup with identical sources feeding a preamplifier. Then the goal would be to utilize two identical interconnects from the sources that had exactly the same time on them. If the listeners could agree that they sounded identical then on could be swapped with a new one and then any difference could only be attributed to break-in. 

@raam 

That's good- thanks for sharing that. I would love it if you could post that at ASR, and see what kind of negative reactions come your way 😁

Not sure I have written about this here but I have plenty of experience in test gear use as spent 20 years in the US Navy as first a Data Systems Tech then it was merged with Fire Control Tech and re-titled that. The most complex gear I worked on, one out of two left still in use, no training on it, cannot say to much but it had a large number of critical circuits that the block diagram was 20 pages long. The most important aspect took 4 scope probes to look at and if dialed in according to specs which was very difficult and hugely time consuming to do, the whole system did not work well and it was absolutely critical to the operation of the whole battle group. What did work, tuning it by ear, then it was so good we broke ever record of reliability by a far margin. 

 

I recently took a look at some rather good threads on that site and found there are those that are far more open minded than I thought would be the case. Of course there are those that are very closed minded as well. I believe all things are possible unless proven otherwise and then that is only until someone comes along and figures it out.

The gear I worked on took a great deal less time to make it work well beyond original specification tuning by ear even though it would not pass inspection going by the "book". I was flown around the battle group a few times, while at sea, to take a look at other ships newer versions systems which were much smaller and even some were tiny in physical comparison and had few if anyway to tune them though they met specs....best I could advise was retuning couplers, which other techs said were in tune, sometimes that improved things and my advice was from listening to the signal, not using a scope, etc. I used to get in quite the heated debates over this but when we set records so high we had a high level week long all they way up the chain investigation, VERY high level, that we came out great in...just saying, our ears can be quite the judge:)

Not sure I will post this stuff on ASR but anyone wanting to quote me by all means do so.

 

Rick