Surge, you comment seems dismissive to the point of displaying a simple lack of high-end experience.
In that, I just got back from a friend’s house where he had a very nice set up including Pass Labs amplification, Wilson Sasha 2’s, a VPI classic 3 turntable (that I had set-up), and a mishmash of good old interconnect cables, speaker cables, and power cords. Overall, his sound was very good, natural, and convincing. It had a nice relaxed feel and we could just focus on the music, playing record, after record.
Well he finally had the chance to break down and drop some serious dollars on a real nice full loom of Tara Labs cables. By all rights, this should take his kit to a much more refined level of performance overall. So we couldn’t resist, we stripped out all the old stuff, put these new ones in cold out of the UPS box, and guess what? The sound was completely confusing both timbre and soundstage where a complete harsh, smeared mess, the system was unlistenable and a total waste of time, I mean, down right nasty. Two days later? Still unlistenable.
I have been here so many times. I told my friend that we either needed a burner service or we would have to do it the long hard way by downloading a sweep track or use a burn CD and let these run for a week or two without listening.
The bottom line here is that the more resolving a system is, and the more experienced your ears become, burn-in is more easily recognizable as a real necessity, not just voodoo, or a figment of someone’s imagination. One could not just have plugged them in and sit down and enjoy the music. (And this is no reflection on the cable maker or dealer. It is just a matter of fact and I have no doubt that once they are burned in, we will experience killer performance like many of their cables I have experienced before.)
