You’re asking if cryo is different from breaking in, or further improves a burned-in cable. It is. And it does.
A cable cooker does nothing more than play a signal through the wire. Same as when you play music. Generally instead of music the signal is some dynamic wide spectrum noise you would never in your life want to hear. But essentially same thing. You want to pay for this, oh well. To each his own.
Cryo is completely different. Cryo cools things down so much the molecules slow way down to the point they are able to settle into a more stable pattern. Pretty much all manufacturing processes wind up heating enough and then cooling fast enough to leave a more or less chaotic mess.
I’ve got a fair amount of experience with cryo, having started with brake rotors on my Porsche, then razor blades, CDs, whole CD players, all the wire running from my breaker panel to my room, and a whole pile of interconnects, speaker cables and power cords. All of this stuff I was able to hear before and after. Quite a bit of it I had dupes and so cryo’d one and not the other so as to be able to compare side by side. After cryo the cable is so different it needs pretty much the same burn-in all over again.
At Cryo One here in Puyallup the owner races shifter karts. Me being a PCA Driving Instructor we hit it off and he told me a lot about the business. So not the usual bull but actually good info here.
Cryo works great for so many things its easier to just say everything rather than list them. Your cable or player goes in a chest freezer right along with camshafts, brake rotors, custom hunting knives and musical instruments. In goes the liquid nitrogen, down goes the lid, and we wait. They tend to charge by the item but its really the mass that has to be cooled. My guy charged me less than a buck a pound, a helluva deal.
Cryo definitely makes a difference. As others have said its a pretty safe bet all the cables sold today have been cryo’d. Cryo makes a pretty big improvement in detail, extension, and grain and glare. Not a lot in terms of bass extension but you do hear deeper into the sound stage. Minus the cryo a lot of cables would probably be only about as good as your typical DIY crap. Setup and processing costs are low. This makes it a no-brainer for cable manufacturers.
For us though, whole different story. For the benefit you get shipping costs alone make it questionable. Then most places overcharge to a distrubing degree. To get away with this they make up stories about their intricate cycles, blah blah yada yada. Pure BS. Find someone local, get it done for at most a couple bucks a pound, or forget it. You’re better off putting the money into a SR Blue Quantum Fuse.
Cryo, once done, does not need to be done again. Burn-in, once done, only stays done while the cables remain in place.
Unplug any cable, move it around, the materials become disturbed enough that it can take a while getting back to where it was. But we’re talking minutes not hours. Discovered this myself accidentally one time comparing to see if there was any difference between two Master Coupler power cords. There was. Until I swapped them back again and eventually figured out just wiggling one around can mess up the sound. It settles down again pretty quick but can sound pretty bad the first minute or so. Had Caelin over one time, the Shunyata guy, and noticed how carefully he handled his power cords. So there you go.
