audiophile folklore - cables and claims from manufacturers

ANYONE who has owned Nordost cable, and specifically Valhalla, KNOWS that that damn cable needs extensive break in. In the beginning, it was so screechy that I had to leave the room while listening to a Motown Supremes anthology CD. (Everything else was screechy too, but that disc stood out worse than any other disc). At first I thought it was the CD, but after playing a classical selection, I realized (again) that the cable hadn’t burned in, and it had been playing non-stop for weeks...

With Nordost, unless you are completely deaf, you will hear an utterly piercing quality, a brightness, which is SO offensive (at least back in 2013 and I’d had Nordost before), you won’t be able to listen to your CDs. I couldn’t.

I confess to being surprised people still debate this, after 20 years, when I was in the business (no longer). But then, I don’t know peoples’ setups, whether or not they have room treatment (with Nordost, room treatment or not, it will singe your ears, as though you’d turned up the treble on a cheap integrated to +15). But I also find that most people aren’t listening to music composed of mainly acoustic instruments or un-engineered voices (which eliminates the great, great, GREAT majority of pop music, going back to the 1980s).

Burn-in is real, although I have to say I didn’t notice it as much on the MIT "Magic Hose" cable of the 1980s, or even Transparent cable of that time. Or Ocos or Straight Wire. I notice it more on cable introduced after the mid 1990s (Nordost, in particular). And I don't hear it on the Synergistic cable I have in another system, although I did note that the violin sonatas improved over a week's time. Nordost is really the "king" if someone wants to hear what an un-burned in cable sounds like. I'd like to be sitting there with someone in person when somebody challenges me on that and they have brand new Nordost cables in the upper leagues. You'll hear it; of that there is zero doubt. You'll feel like someone is continually scraping their fingernails across a blackboard. I guarantee that.

I noticed it less on the Shunyata Theta cable I bought a few weeks ago, but then, Shunyata stated, 5 years abo, that they had discovered a way to eliminate the long burn-in periods for their older cable (such as the Anaconda Zi-Tron I have, or the Sigma V2 cables I had), and experience is the best teacher, so it appears they have eliminated that.

And I agree with Tomcy6 about packing the board with more resisters, capacitors and the like causing minor issues. Goldmund used fully separated chambers to isolate components in the Mimesis line (their top line in the 90s), which was great for the sound, but made the Mimesis 9 weight 150 pounds. Still, one couldn’t argue with the sound quality...

Well, if nothing else, that's definitely the worst Nordost sales pitch I've ever read. 

@gbmcleod 

+1

@frank009   perhaps you have never heard of Astoria studio, it's David Gilmour's houseboat studio that uses 14 miles of audiophile cables. They also burned the cables in. They did blind listening tests to determine what sounded best.

Cables can make a difference, but good cables should be transparent. It is up to the audiophile to properly design their system so that the desired end sound is achieved before cables are brought into the equation.

Cables that "sound better" do so by correcting an existing imbalance or shortcoming. Cables are passive components that cannot add anything that isn’t there, but they can very well mitigate undesired characteristics. For instance, a speaker cable with the right capacitance and impedance values might tame overly bright tweeters, because it acts as a simple low-pass filter.

But at the end of the day, a person shouldn’t have bought bright speakers if they didn’t like a bright sound.

That very same cable might have a negative effect when used with bass-heavy speakers.

A competent audiophile achieves the desired end sound via thoughtful system building. They do not need to leverage cables as tone controls or after-the-fact sonic crutches.