My two delightfully big improvements in recent years: (1) adding Vandersteen’s Sub Nine subwoofers to my Model Seven MkII system. “Like a fresh wind flew up through the entire bandwidth.” (2) Audioquest’s Thunderbird interconnects (first rung in their Mythical Creatures series). Big increase in resolution and just general accessibility of the music.
+1 to Coltrane’s and others’ followup observations about the instrumental effect of mood on desire to listen. So it’s not just me.
I’m an audio engineer, so I have a big issues with people raving about new cables, gear etc when they don’t do an A/B test. (they just add the new item and declare it “better”)
The human brain has a goldfish memory for sounds - one cable one week and another another is too wide a gap to make any sort of accurate comparison - what is left is - fooling yourself that the new ethernet “cleaner” or spendy Coax cable IS great…
To a/b test you need to swap back and forth between the old and new gear as rapidly as possible - 5 seconds is good… And it’s always good to enlist a friend to play judge with you. Swap the new and old items in and out & use the same passage of music each test. If you hear no benefit - return the new item.
Electronic gear isn’t a stew - it doesn’t get better overnight or a week later!
Listen for sizzle on cymbals, vocal reverb, bass deepness, can you hear sub bass better?
The whole ‘letting it settle in for a week’ adage is total BS rapid A/B tests are the only way to really test equipment…
Anyhow, that said, I had some great results with a Mutec REF10 SE120 Wordclock - it added a magical depth to the soundstage (which disappeared when disengaged - as in a) not there b) there)
Isoacoustics isolation under speakers. There are numerous options, whichever I use it always makes a significant difference. Whether the £85 for eight Mini Pucks under standmounts or the expensive Gaias under floorstanders (I use the latter under my standmount stands).
Last week I demo’d the Mini Pucks to a manufacturer who was picking some £1k active speakers I’d just reviewed. It needed one track, he was amazed at the difference.
And in the UK at least you can hear the difference at shows - the UK distributor sets up two pairs of Focal floorstanders next to each other and switches between them. No it’s not double blind testing. Yes it’s easy to hear the difference. I’m getting to sound like a stuck record recommending them (I have no vested interest).
Whether that difference is worth the money is, of course, subjective. For those screaming snake oil have a look at the website, where there’s a lot of science on the underlying technology (the owner is an ex-pro studio designer with some impressive credits). Oh and pros use Isoacoustics a lot, and as people have noted they’re not prone to BS 
One of the best quotes I’ve read in a while! 
The only item I’ve ever found that has any actual “burn-in” is a brand new loudspeaker driver.
I build my own speakers and give the bass and mid drivers a 40Hz “massage” for a couple of hours to loosen up the suspension. You can measure the change in TS parameters before and after. But after the treatment, they don’t change at all. All this 200 - 300 hour “burn-in” some manufacturers claim is needed for their loudspeakers is ■■.
There was a thread on here a while back about cable “burn-in”. It got extremely polarised extremely quickly and was eventually shut down.
Cable-wise, I use decent pro grade interconnects and speaker cables. Canare or Van Damme starquad for interconnects with Neutrik XLRs and Canare 4S11 starquad speaker cable with Neutrik Speakons. Can’t imagine spending outlandish amounts on cables with equally outlandish claims reagarding audio fidelity. The laws of physics (R,L & C) prevail here.
It is completely understandable that an item with physical moving parts, such as drivers, need time.
I’ve just been through a similar situation in my system with a new cartridge on my vinyl setup that has needed time to approach its peak operating conditions.
And yes, the comment on it not being a stew was excellent.
As a digital only guy nowadays, I didn’t consider this, although it makes perfect sense that as physical transducers, vinyl cartridges would require a certain amount of use to reach optimal equilibrium.
It’s been a fun few days. Initially the slope of change was perceptible over the duration of only one or two tracks. It has now slowed to a point where I can’t perceive any further change at around the 25 hour mark.
I’ve had to wait until it stopped changing so I can start to experiment with cartridge loading - no point in trying before when one is not in control of all the other variables.
Well I’m 70 and was at the Fillmore East many times, (including being on the side of the stage), and who knows how many other big / loud shows around the country and world. I was also a motorcycle guy and clay target shooter. My biggest / recent OMG moments came from switching to a Schiit Yggdrasil DAC and from when I inherited my late friends’ Sound Applications power strip conditioner. Regarding the Sound Applications product, This must be one of the early ones that Jim built. 20yrs plus. I was skeptical and did not expect much, but I was shocked after a couple of weeks when I noticed the change in my system. Don’t ask me how, but the whole system pulled together and sounded like what I always thought it should sound like, Yes, now very expensive, but hand built, and not a light weight improvement!
I too like this quote. With things that move physically, I guess it’s possible that use would potentially change the characteristic and it may take some time for it to be optimal.
When I generally see “burn in” relative to gear – and this is often in gear reviews as these reviewers “burn in” the gear for weeks – I assume it’s actually burning in the listener, not burning in the gear. In other words, it takes time for the ear/brain to adjust and to determine if you really like the sound of something. (And I suspect this “myth” started so that new buyers would “burn in” their gear past the 30 day return period.)
And this is my objection to those who hold A/B tests so dear. It is not that I am not an objectivist. It is that quick flicks of the switch from one sound to another may allow you to detect if there is a difference, but I don’t believe it allows one to detect which is “better,” “more accurate,” or what have you, except in extreme cases like an AM radio versus a Magnepan setup. I have often changed the system and immediately thought I heard something I liked better, then later realized it is too sharp, to fatiguing, or too dull, or whatever, but the point is, at least for me, my instant A/B reaction doesn’t always or even usually become my permanent opinion.
So that is not to say that A/B comparisons have no value, but I think they stop at “is there a difference?” Rather than “which would I prefer in the long run?”
Now, onto my OMG moment: it was when I took the passive crossovers off my Magnepan 3.3rs and actively biamped them with a Marchand active crossover and two 200WPC amps (Classe and Krell, for reference). There literally was a veil lifted off. But this is the type of thing where you would expect that - it’s a complete change in the speaker configuration, including more than doubling the power since it eliminates the inefficiency of the passive crossover while also allowing the use of 2 amps.
Changes in amps, preamps, sources, with long term listening I can detect some differences albeit I am not sure how much they really move the needle on enjoyment. But that one biamplification with the active crossover - older Maggies are built to do that with an external crossover you can just bypass – that was a serious difference.
Exactly. The thing that bothers me about the sort of absolutist pronouncements on message boards like this is that they fail to account for the changeability of human perception and experience. It isn’t just about the gear, it’s about human perception-- and everyone teaches themselves to hear with equipment (ears and other senses) that change over time. I tend to favor judgements (formed by myself or others) over an extended period of time living with something.
The biggest problem is confirmation bias-- of course the $2,000 power cable sounds better because I spent $2,000 on it. Or, in reverse, “I firmly believe my $199 Chinese DAC is the equal to six figure gear from DCS.” Whatever gets you through the night, I suppose. I’ve never heard a $100,000+ stereo system, so I really don’t know and ultimately don’t care if they’re better or worse than what I listen to, because that level of geekery is far beyond my reach. But I’m willing to entertain the notion that six figure systems might (or might not) sound better to me.
OMG moments. Well I was surprised by a skeptical purchase. I recently purchased the TEAC UD-701N DAC as it was using a TEAC/ESOTERIC’s own DAC processing software. Coming from R2R DACs it appealed to me. First impressions were good. Soundstage, clarity and depth were all slightly better to my ears. I then fell into the review and forum trap about adding the TEAC master clock. I phoned the dealer and got some great pricing on one. After the purchase all I could think about was “well this might be a waste of money” The clock arrived along with a $50 50 Ohms cable for the connection. Well the improvement was a shock. Better clarity and soundstage with an improved noise floor. I kept playing it with and without the clock as I could not believe the difference. I brought a smile to my face every time I connected the clock. It ended up being a good purchase.
But that’s exactly where the problem is. With a week of listening you can (subconsciously) convince yourself that anything might sound better than anything. But with a proper blind ABX test you’d know if the difference exists in the first place. Which it might. Or not, depending on what was actually changed.
I couldn’t have expressed it better myself, sometimes my system doesn’t get switched on for days, other times it’s on every day.
Sometimes music just doesn’t work for me…
Exactly. You can also make a snap judgement that there is no difference in a matter of moments, completely missing something you weren’t listening for at that time— something that wasn’t on your radar to be listening for. Hearing is like looking— if you’re distracted or simply unconcerned about it, you won’t hear or see it.
That’s why doing proper blind testing is also a science… But generally when people are asked to compare two “things” theyt will look for differences, and find some even where none exists (stories of audiophiles noticing veils lifted and blackness blackened when A and B were, in fact, exactly the same, abound; granted, this happens in other areas, too).
That’s a very beautiful room. Appropriately, it’s my internal vision of what a Danish house looks like!
Have you contacted Thierry? He does surround sound filters too, if I’m not mistaken.
Nice looking speakers!
I’ve always thougt that too! I also never had the experience that something had to burn-in, except for speakers. In the electrical world a milisecond can be very long and things might go on a logarithmic scale, so who says the capacitors take a few weeks to burn in? A few electronic cycles, that is a few miliseconds might be enough.
My system consists of chord Dave and Blu MkII with M scaler, AGD gran Versace monoblocs, Sonus Faber Il cremonese my previous streamer was Aurender n10. I upgraded to an Antipodes K50. Holy crap the improvement was breathtaking
