Maybee we all just need to buy “Nordost Blue Heaven AC Cord” 
Torben
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Yeah, well, in the extreme example, try listening to music with a cable that’s just emerged from the freezer and let me know how THAT sounds and get back to me. I genuinely feel sorry for the “anti-snake oil” among us who reject the notion of break in. But oh well……
I think it would be more interesting for me to look for a teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars, so I won’t get back to you.
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I have to say, when I read this, I spit coffee out my nose, which is not the usual conducting path for coffee, and only occurs when I’m laughing so hard it flows through my nasal passages.
Yep. Simple, grade school science. Ever roast a hot dog impaled on two nails by running AC current through it? Metallurgy doesn’t have much to do with it. Conductance is all!
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Yes finally some science in cable land, but is there a doctor or professor in this forum here or are we all engineers? My analog design teacher told us we can all get our master in electronics but that doesn’t mean we can design a really good power supply.
Also classes in long electrical lines opened my eyes that there is more than resistance.
Still I was always very sceptical, until now that I have a very revealing system. I didn’t want to hear any difference between two speaker cables but unfortunately I have to admit that that old vdHull cs122 cable that has been layong around for decades sounds better than my standard thick copper wire I used before. And I can’t figure out why.
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We can however call ■■ on expensive power cables or on theories that the THD of the line voltage is relevant in a well designed PSU.
Yes, there’s also inductance and capacitance. But those don’t matter in a functioning digital cable like USB with length within the specs. For an analog cable like speaker cables, the question is: how long does it have to be for its impedance to become comparable to the speaker’s? I would guess really long. There’s also the problem of noise pickup, but then again, how much noise does it have to pick up to become audible when applied to a speaker without further amplification? I would guess a lot of noise. Does that really happen? That’s easy to tell: listen at zero volume and see if you can hear anything.
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The TechRadar review says this:
We found the treble of this cable perplexing: it seems well-extended and also tuneful but just a little shut-in, resulting in slightly constricted imaging. Bass is also extended but lacking in weight and tunefulness. Despite that, it has good impact; this is a very rhythmically confident cable.
People don’t seem to like it when I adduce what I feel are likely hypotheses for these judgements.
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If we can agree that a master importer like Bill Parrish of GTT Audio for premium brands like Mola Mola, Audionet, Vivid Audio and Kubala-Sosna cables knows more than most of us , you might find value in a comment he emailed to me this morning. Re: the Makua he makes reference to “a few hundred hours “ and said:
“It is World-Class. I am glad it warmed up and is breaking in for you. It will even get better. A few hundred hours of passing a signal through it does wonders.”
And there is also this
So my response here is partly relayed to burn in and partly related to how “cables matter.” I had Nordost HEIMDALL 2 cables. I thought they were “good enough to great.” I now have Cerious Technolgies Lumniscate loom and WOW. Night and day. And adding the power cords to my preamp, DAC, and Sonore streamer brought it all home.
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About something, I’m sure. Like how to explain lousy performance of equipment he’s sold by pushing things down the road “a few hundred hours”? I’d never get my “facts” from folks who want to sell things. Bill Parrish wants to sell expensive equipment. John E. Johnson, Jr., wants to sell ads for his Web site.
Look, I don’t buy Parmesan Reggiano raw and then age it for two years in my own cave; you don’t need to “age” properly built audio components. Anything that will keep changing as you use it should be avoided, I’d think.
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I’m afraid I can’t agree with that either - unless you meant they know more about marketing and how to make people feel good about their golden ears. “Night and day” is always dubious - unless you compare to a wind-up gramophone.
I’ll leave it at that.
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Ok. We shall leave it at that, then.
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Of course there’s more than resistance. Cable impedance - a mixture of resistance, inductive and capacative reactance which will change the phase relationship between voltage and current at different frequencies. Reactance is frequency dependent too.
A good speaker cable shouldn’t audibly affect music reproduction. At the extremes, cables with very high inductance can cause attenuation at high frequencies, but it has to be really high inductance. Extremely high capacitance can also cause high frequency attenuation, but again it needs to be extreme.
The only way to truly compare speaker cables is blind, i.e. without knowing which cable you’re listening to.
For reason I don’t understand this most logical of all approaches never happens.
And just out of curiosity: Would an uber-high end power cord do it’s magic even when plugged into a 5 bucks Amazon Basics power strip? From what I read here it clearly should.
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I think what it does or doesn’t do very much depends on whether or not you believe in magic!
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Quite the two words I know I reject most.
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Much of what we hear is subjective. And because of this many customers intentionally select specific components that are KNOWN to be “warm,” while others prefer ?neutral" and some people prefer “clinical.” To those following this post who appear to have an antipathy toward dealers and their recommended upgrades and have taken a position against “burn in " as a “thing” I would just say this: I have a friend who is NOT a Mola Mola dealer. He is NOT a Krell dealer. Bit he networks and has been in the industry for 25 years, attends trade shows, etc.
When I first installed my Makua, I freaked. I did NOT like the way it sounded compared to my Krell. I called my friend - a true disinterested third party who stood to gain nothing by way of his input. He said, and I am paraphrasing, " Your Krell Illusion is a fantastic piece. It excels at most every level. HOWEVER, it leans to over emphasizing the lower frequencies with a degree of warmth that in my view deserves a demerit point for this “additive” property .Many people LIKE or LOVE this sound. But IMO it is NOT in the same league as the Makua which I know quite well. That is true “state of the art” hifi which competes with many preamps that sell for TENS OF THOUSANDS oOF DOLLARS MORE. Trust me when I tell you, Bob: you must turn it on, walk away and don’t listen seriously for at least 48 hours.It will blow you away once properly burned in.”
And. to his credit, he was right. The SQ improved 25% in the space of just 4-5 hours, and now some 3 days later, sounds TWICE AS GOOD. So, for those following this post with animus against dealers because they happen to sell quality product and happen to profit by way of informed opinions AND/OR simply wanting to serve ce the customer as best they can, this gentleman had absolutely no dog in the fight. He just knew the Makua extremely well, and like the selling dealer just knew that the unit needed quite a bit of break in or burn in time. So there’s that. I kind of rest my case.
“Math” posted six years ago:
AJ
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Not to disrespect your friend, but it sounds like he’s been exposed to dealers and their brainwashing tricks quite a bit. Are you sure he’s not buying into the same bogus audio mythology? The Makua manual makes no mention of burn-in – you’d think they’d say something if it were necessary.
On the other hand, waiting 48 hours to “listen seriously” would allow your aural memory of the Krell’s distortion to fade, and thus allow you to experience the Makua with a more open mind. Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell you.
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The problem is that equipment doesn’t sound different with time and you can measure it. Very occasionally equipment measures very slightly differently and then stabilises after a few minutes when up to operating temperature.
What changes is our auditory perception. Additionally our auditory memory is poor. The notion of burn-in plays on human fallibility and is a manufacturer’s/dealer’s way of getting you to persist with and ultimately keep something you maybe didn’t like that much at first.
There’s no such thing as break-in or burn-in, except in the case of electromechanical transducers. Speaker drivers’ characteristics change slightly in the first few hours of use as the suspension loosens up and this is measurable as a change in Fs and VAS. Vinyl cartridges also change slightly in the first few hours.
Component and cable burn-in is a myth perpetuated by the industry.
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Hi @AE67, I can tell you the “one thing” if you like. It turns out that audio data gets sent over USB cables in a different way than other types of data. It’s not like the proverbial bank data, or a Word file being saved to a drive. It’s streamed continuously, so there is no provision for re-sending a data packet if one arrives corrupted or fails to arrive at all. The receiving device cannot ask for a packet to get sent again in the way that other non-realtime USB data endpoints can.
That isn’t to say that super-pricy USB cables necessarily make a real difference to a stereo system. But the fact that some people in the audio world obsess over this stuff is not completely crazy. Despite what some very authoritative-sounding people on this forum say, there is electrical noise in digital signals. And digital data when it’s transmitted by a cable is not numbers - it’s not even digital, really. It’s just an analog approximation of a periodic square-wave that the protocol gives meaning to. If data packets never get corrupted or dropped, why would the USB protocol even have provisions for data checks and re-transmission? Nevertheless, these systems are designed so the correct signal almost always gets through just fine anyway. Almost always.