???Cartridge break in???

That has always been my suspicion, Nandric.  "Break-in" is the period during which you can gradually forget what you had before that might have sounded better or just as good, before you spent your big bucks.  But that's the cynical view, I guess.

Dear Lew, We are both skeptical oriented. Skeptic 1. Nothing is
for shure my friend!'' Skeptic nr. 2: ''are you sure about that
my friend?''

A good cartridges sounds good from the start after everything aligned properly, well maybe 2-3 days to make sure, after one week of listening do not expect much if you don’t like the sound (if there is no issue with wrong tonearm or weak phono stage).

A bad sounding cartridge can’t transform to a good sounding cartridge after 200 hrs of use (just because of the the burn-in process).

But as a humans we need some time, we must be a certain mood, listening music if fun, a therapy, a meditation. Maybe it is a break-in process for our brain when there is a new component in our system. We need some time to live with it in our system before we can make a decision.

Logicaly ''break in'' assume reliability of our ''sound memory''. 
Otherwise comparison between different ''time points '' would not
make sense. The problem is that our sound memory is not
reliable. We probably accomodate to our carts after some period
of time. My (other) brother Don refuse to use comaprison ''better
than...'' but instead ''they sound different''. 

Better to one might be different to someone else?  (grin)