Initial disappointment with 1st set of “expensive’ IC’s...

Thanks everyone for the kind wishes. It means a lot there’s too much bad this gets tossed around on this site

@dletch2

Well, returning them is not an option (private sale) Cardas is a top notch manufacturer and while it’s possible that the QC could be off on one or both sets of the cables I’d say it’s most likely not the issue. It could very well be that the Cardas just sound like crap in my rig. I’m kicking around the idea of doing a A/B test by having a friend swap the cables (or not) with my Shirokazu Yazaki Belden 8402’s and see If I can tell the difference. I think I could easily detect the difference right now so I’d want more time with the Cardas before I do that just to see if it changes or appears to have changed...So if it’s a crap sounding cable then it should continue to sound that way and I should be able to detect it’s offensiveness compared to the Belden a week or month from now. Correct?

Burn in is real. Huge difference. BUT nothing ever goes from crap to magic. Does not happen. What does happen, stuff that sounds really good right from the first minute opens up and fills out and sounds way better as time goes by, sometimes even continuing to improve well into a hundred hours or more.

By and large though people saying you need to wait 100 hours are blowing smoke. Like I said, it sounds good right out of the box, or it doesn’t. The sow’s ear never does become a silk purse.

Right now you are listening and paying attention to some tiny little subset of a very long list of audio attributes. When you have heard a couple dozen, or hundred, things burn in, to the point you are able to see the pattern, get back to us then.

There is no such thing as diminishing returns. The grain of truth that confuses and misleads people is that sometimes you can find one thing that is so good it costs a freaking fortune to get even a tiny little bit better. Townshend F1 cables for example, or Herron VTPH2A phono stage. There are any number of examples like this, and at just about any price level too.

But saying that is to miss the forest for the trees. There is also rubber bands that will isolate cables and improve sound and cost zero. So where are the diminishing returns? If you see diminishing returns, all that is telling you is you are looking in the wrong place.