I wouldn’t bet the farm on that observation, bc.
I’ve had many components that did not display their true character until nearly a month. Nordost’s interconnects typically take several weeks to mature into their full sound. I well remember the Frey 2 sounding GREAT out of the box, although it certainly had a pronounced treble. I, nonetheless, commanded the presence of 3 friends who attend symphonies regularly. They were dumbfounded, and this was only 10 days into my ownership. We all heard the brightness, but the separation of instruments - even on a Moody Blues album - was phenomenal, and I’m used to components of the highest quality. I remember the exact day, when a friend of mine, who is a conductor, came over and marveled at the amount of harmonic information he heard in my system. Ironically, that was the very day that I heard the change in the system and was initially nonplussed: the brightness had diminished somewhat and this was exactly 30 days of continuous play 24/7. It wasn’t that the sound wasn’t fantastic in the way that it had been up to that point, but it was less ’bright’. There was actually, LESS "excitement" in the music, but later on, after my conductor friend left, I realized it sounded more the way music sounds in a good concert hall. Sometimes, the "exciting" phase is not actually the sound truest to the live musical experience, meaning the sense of not hearing "reproduced" music, but hearing something pretty close to flat-out LIVE. And I was less overwhelmed when that brightness subsided, but then I recognized that I could hear more of the inner detail: the keys on clarinets "clacking," the "jitter" that occurs when you hear music close up, which is not an artifact, but the actual artistry of the musician’s playing (and different than the term "micro-dynamics"). THAT came much more into existence when the break-in period was winding down, although if you had TOLD me that the sound was going to improve in that particular way, I would have found that hard to imagine. It was just more "real," and I hear "real" every week.
We tend to make guesses about components without actually knowing. When the WATTS first came out in 1986, people were outraged that Wilson charged $4400 for a "mini-monitor" speaker. Time has changed that particular attitude. I had them back then, and kept hearing people who hadn’t heard them make sounds of disapproval. And I thought: well, I have it. And you don’t. So how can you - with any authority - tell me that I was gypped. Nobody says that now, of course. But they did back then.
Shunyata INSISTS that the sound of their power cords stabilizes after 125 hours. I don’t know how THEY get that result, but I - and many, MANY other owners - have observed the sound to blossom fully around 400 hours. The Nordost Frey interconnects CLEARLY changed on the 30th day, which means 168/week for 4 weeks and 2 days, which is over 700 hours. And if you read Roy Gregory’s reviews (and he is among the most careful of ALL reviewers in detailing the time factor involved, particularly with Nordost), he found the same thing, give or take a few days. Perhaps running the interconnects thru the CD player wasn’t enough "power" to fully break them in, but however it was that he did it, the break-in time was a month. It may be true also of this Yggdrasil, but only time will tell.
