This is a point I’ve raised before in relation to other Snake-Oil related discussions. If you have to add a tweak to improve something that should have been taken care of in the design of a component, then you’re trying to compensate for shonky engineering. If the manufacturer endorses said tweak, then they’re freely admitting that their design is flawed.
I’m not aware of Meridian, or Linn, to offer a further example recommending different power supply cable to “fix” things that are wrong with their equipment.
Linn supply decent quality mains leads and interconnects with their kit. They’re stock power cables are fine, and they’re ‘Silver’ (copper) interconnects are of good quality.
But replacing these supplied stock items with both a Chord Sarum Super ARAY mains cable on the preamp and Atlas Asimi interconnects between my Linn Klimax Kontrol and Klimax DS/3 has transformed this combo in my system. My experience tells me that.
Yes, different interconnects have different electrical characteristics - L, C and R. Significant differences in values can affect a signal’s amplitude and phase and the differences can be audible. They are also measureable.
This is one of the issues with some high-end cables. Some really are designed to mess with the sound. There are a few around with “black box” networks (filters) added to them. Probably some serious effects on the signal going on there…
Interesting, but not especially relevant to this discussion: “the two configurations … compared in the listing trials differed only in the choice of analog interconnects”.
They plan to test cables of same topology in the future:
A worthwhile future extension of this work, would
be to develop high-performance instrumentation that can
cleanly switch between two single-ended interconnects.
This will allow assessing sonic differences arising from
cables’ transmission characteristics that are unrelated to
topology
He discusses break-in of drivers (bass and mid-bass) in a few of his designs and usually measures the T/S parameters of drive units before and after 4 hours of 40Hz “massage”. Basically, driving a high amplitude 40Hz tone into a drive unit to loosen up the suspension. His findings align with Scan-Speak’s comments. Initially, there can be quite a substantial change in parameters, but after initial break-in the parameters remain constant.
It’s the only area of hi-fi where burn-in/break-in is actually a real thing.
I find that my system, which I attribute to the speakers, sound a lot better, especially the bass on very hot days. Pure speculation, but I suspect the driver surround is more pliable on hot days, causing the improved response. We are currently experiencing a heat wave, around 40 degrees C and the system sounds incredible. Of course it could very well be psychological, it’s summer in my neck of the woods after all.
I wish I could remember where I saw it, but there was an article about this. Something to do with sound wave propagation through the denser humid air. I suspect that heat definitely has an effect of some kind. Though again I’d stress that we need to remember the human element here, we are such fragile things when it comes to memory and experience and the environment can completely change how we perceive things, often having nothing to do with the experience itself, just our perception of it.
Good example, I cracked open a whisky the other night. One of my favourites from when I first got into whisky, notmally sweet, Sherry heavy and woody, it tasted bitter, synthetic, like burned rubber.
Had the whisky changed, of course not. But a combination of my mood and what I’d eaten before influenced my experience. I had it again a few days later and it was exactly as I expected. Reality is the whisky hadn’t changed one bit, but I had
The same is true of how we hear hifi. How susceptible we are to mood, environment and the power of expectation bias. Very rarely does Any of this nonsense have anything to do with the kit. If you can learn to free your mind of that way of thinking, the hobby becomes much easier and you can get back to the music.
It’s like people who post this don’t even actually read it.
