Excellent points by
@grannyring
Break will never go from very poor to the best I ever heard to be frank. System synergy and personal preference are very important considerations here. Nordost is very different sounding vs Duelund.
I agree wholeheartedly with the first sentence. If you don't like the cables early on, you will probably never like the cables. However, I use a Cable Cooker for the sole reason of removing doubts about how they will ultimately sound, so my experiences
regarding burn-in,
would be of no help to you. I do use Ayre's disc for touch-ups sometimes so if you don't want to bear the cost of a burn-in device I agree with the use of a burn-in track as offered on discs by both Ayre and Stereophile.
I thought of one thing that might be relevant to your comparison with Nordost. I have some nice Furutech FP-Alpha speaker cables here. Even though I have several other good cables, those Furutech cables and the cables from Duelund or WE wire are the one's I keep going back to. The OCC alpha-treated Furutech cables are mostly neutral with a slight midrange focus and a touch of bloom. They do nothing wrong and seem better than average across the board. When I replace the tinned copper Duelund or WE cables with the Furutechs, I usually think wow, these sound really good and have even better high end extension. However, over the long term, when I go back to the Duelund or WE speaker cables, I enjoy the increased midrange bloom and fuller, slightly more impactful bass and find those attributes to be even more musical. In the end, the musicality wins out. The main thing I view a little differently than
@grannyring is that I have not yet developed a clear preference for the Duelund cables over cables made from WE10ga wire. I am in the process of making another pair of Duelund cables and continuing my comparison between the two types of wire.
