Moving cables around killed dynamics for days anyone else experience this?

George Cardas of Cardas Audio has stated many times that simply moving cables will degrade the sound and it will take several days for the sound to recover. 

It is always educational to hear the difference of an audio system at an audio show on day one as compared to the final day.

David Pritchard

10db would be more a concert hall / outdoor venue figure, but completely possible

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The venue was about 15 mil cu ft....a large warehouse space converted to studio use. It was right beside Lake Ontario (like about 40 ft away). We did the tech survey in February and shot in August. And we had recordings of the before and after, and tape don’t lie ( read ..tape provides a fairly objective view of the event unencumbered by the ear brain editing functions...).

Cardas also says things like this below from their website. Note that any standing voltage is DC (music is AC). However, if I take a fairly inexpensive 2 meter interconnect I have lying around that has not been connected up to anything in months, load it with 100K ohms (higher than most inputs), and hook that up to a 6.5 digit Agilent 34465 meter, I measure <10uV, or at least 100db on a 1V signal, and lower than the offset of any practical amplifier. Of course, the source is likely around 2K, so that 10uV, would be much less.

There are many factors that make cable break-in necessary and many reasons why the results vary. If you measure a new cable with a voltmeter you will see a standing voltage because good dielectrics make poor conductors. They hold a charge much like a rubbed cat’s fur on a dry day. It takes a while for this charge to equalize in the cable. Better cables often take longer to break-in. The best "air dielectric" techniques, such as PFA tube construction, have large non-conductive surfaces to hold charge, much like the cat on a dry day.

Also said this, yet I can put an unused interconnect in front of a speaker playing loud, load one end with 2K (mainly to shunt RF via AC), plug the other end to the AP, and not measure anything above -120db except a spike at 60Hz if the cable is not routed properly?

Cable that has a standing charge is measurably more microphonic and an uneven distribution of the charge causes something akin to structural return loss in a rising impedance system

Cardas makes a lot of other claims, and like the ones above, while there is truth in them, it is the old "lie and statistics" thing. Let’s take that standing voltage thing. I measured <10uV. Cardas says in their marketing blurb, MV (millivolt range, or 100 times more). Who is telling the truth??? We both are. The difference is, I loaded the cable with a rather unrealistic 100K load. I should have loaded it with say 10K to represent a worst case source impedance. That would have brought it down to say 1uV or 1000 times less than Cardas’ marketing number. What did Cardas use? ... likely the input impedance of their meter, perhaps 10 meg (million) ohms. A completely unrealistic number for an interconnect, and a ridiculous number for a speaker cable to power cable.

For a microphone cable with low signal levels and high impedance, micro-phonics is an issue. Teflon being stiffer than say foamed PP/PE (or an air dielectric) is potentially much less susceptible to microphonics as you have less moving of the conductors, which causes pumping of the voltage as with any capacitor if you keep the charge constant. Of course in microphones you often have microphones with a high DC bias which forms a way higher charge on the cable than any "standing charge" ... many orders of magnitude.

You never really get all the way there, you sort of keep halving the distance to zero. Some charge is always retained. It is generally in the MV range in a well settled cable.

To be fair, it is a valid concern for MM cables.

Do you live in Illinois? 

OP: I’m glad to hear some people tend to experience this problem, I believe and respect others do not hear it. The issue is I know personally I experience total loss of bloom, bass, spl or energizing of the room or what ever you would like to call it. All cables are many years old and fully broken in, ranging from JPS, Acoustic Zen, XLO Sig. and Harmonic Technology, so solid core, silver and copper.

millercarbon:

Yes handling cables ruins sound quality. Usually very short term, minutes to hours, but it all depends on the handling and the time.

Let me expand on that. There’s a sort of sound quality performance curve that as far as I can tell pretty much everything goes through. But its cyclical and fractal nature combined with not everyone being that great listeners, and more often than not psychologically disinclined as well, its not a thing a lot have picked up on. So let me explain.

You got one very long term cycle, which is performance from new to anywhere from a month or more of steady use. This cycle is big and obvious and bad enough many manufacturers spend time and money burning in before shipping. Even so, everyone knows to expect some time in use before full performance. Once burned in this cycle hits almost a plateau. Almost because long enough out of use and it restarts all over again. But it was a long time peaking, and its a long time going back. Cyclical, see?

Then there’s a much shorter term cycle, the one that happens every night if you turn your stuff off- or even if you don’t. If you do then you get the warm-up phase which can be minutes to hours or even days depending on your particular component. This is why so many SS components should just be left on all the time.

But even left on all the time there’s still the nightly cycle of sounding better and better as the night goes along, until dawn, and it starts to get crappy again, the whole cycle starting all over again that night.

Sorry if people think this is bunk. Or that its just more of the usual mindless repetition of blather heard or read or whatever. Its none of that. This is all stuff I noticed all by myself, same as the OP with his cables. Only I've had a lot more time to think about it. Like 30 years more time.

The one cycle that’s different is cables. Because unlike everything else they can be put off by just wiggling them around. If you could get inside your amp and wiggle all the wires around bet it would do just the same. Wires is wires.

Anyway, same as above. Slight brief wiggling, slight brief cycle reset. If you even are able to notice. Major moving around, coiling and storing and wriggling back into position, expect a major cycle reset.

One thing mentioned is cleaning connections is something I haven’t done in a year or so.

Yeah well you are way overdue then. Mine must have been cleaned fifty times and at least a dozen different ways over the years which is how I know you are overdue. You could at this point wipe with ordinary alcohol and cloth and hear a big improvement. In fact you should try something just like that just to see for yourself.

Right now I am working on doing a thorough review and evaluation of Perfect Path Solutions Total Contact. TC has been around for a while but its gone through different editions and it seems no one yet has given this anywhere near the quality level review it deserves. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If some believe removing cables need time to recover sonicly how can you judge adding or subtracting cables to improve things when the benefits or down falls take a few days to hear.

Well its true, and it isn’t. Its true because, well one time Definitive let me audition a Linn phono stage, but only overnight. So I get home and of course its cold and sounds like crap. Even after a couple hours, pure crap. They wanted it back by 9AM and I almost boxed it right up but decided to leave it on overnight. Next day, it was like a completely different animal. Not for me, but at least now I could understand how it might be, for someone.

But it isn’t true, because a) that’s rare and b) its hours not months and c) its a known known. I know it happens. Even better, I know the fundamental character of the component always comes through even right out of the box.

Its natural to be asking questions because this is all mind-blowing and new right now. I can still recall, though back when I went through it there wasn’t even an internet to find anyone to share it with. There was like, one guy, literally one guy. Why there are still all these years later people wandering around pretending these things aren’t happening, playing their own little part in preventing what should be common knowledge from becoming common, that to me is the real question.