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

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.

@jl1ny,
25+ year Cardas cable owner of several generations. None of my brand new (coiled-up-in box or bag with mechanical tension) Interconnects sounded good at first, ever. Most sounded kinda strange new. Same situation with my better Cardas and my Analysis Plus OCC cables. Set ’em up, and let them rest and RELAX in place for 14-30 days, with no movement at all. None. Use and play them as much as you can while waiting.

Report back in 30 days to let us know if you hear any changes or not. When you get frustrated passing time, read this link below.

http://www.cardas.com/insights_break_in.php

I’ve tried a two "expensive" ICs over the years and neither of them could beat my $10 Belkins.

There is no such thing as diminishing returns.

You have two paths, as an unlimited spender (all evidence I've seen from your posts point to this being your reality).  Either you accept the idea of diminishing returns, where the difference between a $1 cable and a $100 cable is far greater than the difference between a $1K cable and a $50K cable, or at some point you have to admit to yourself that this is all placebo effect. 

Burn-in on cables is nonsense.  Period.  The only thing copper does over time is corrode.  It doesn't get better, it gets worse.  What does happen, however, is your brain acclimates to the specific tonality of what it's hearing out of your system.  No matter how subtle the initial difference between one wire and another, the longer you listen to the replacement, the more accustomed to its response you get.  And when you make a major investment in something expecting results, "burn-in" makes you more comfortable with your purchase as whatever differences you detected the first time you heard it become imprinted in how you perceive your system.  You WANT it to sound better, therefore as you become more comfortable with how it DOES sound, you convince yourself that, indeed, it sounds better. 

The only thing that burns in is your ears.  The difference between cables should be obvious the moment you swap one for another.  I've said elsewhere on this forum that I've done blind listening tests, and I can certainly detect those differences.  Without burn-in.  

And I've also said elsewhere on this forum that the biggest bitch about cables is that every manufacturer trades off one problem for a different problem, so the "best" cable for any given situation is going to depend on a LOT of factors, biggest one being length, because length changes priorities in the R/C/I puzzle.