Cable Break In for the Naysayers

@tattooedtrackman great question/point!

I definitely noticed with some cables I purchased used, there’s about a 24hr and some time longer period that’s needed for the component/cable pairing to start to gel. This applies largely to power cords. Less so with interconnects and speaker cables. And I have not noticed this with Ethernet, USB and other types of digital cables - there is or isn’t any difference it will be apparent right out of the gate.

Nordost power cords are a case in point. I connected the cables, listened for an hour and came back to it next day to find it sounding completely different than when I left it. And yes there’s a getting used to new sound phase but that’s after this change has already occurred. There’s no denying a few days usually is what’s needed to start to get into the subtle differences with cables and components unless you jumped from a stock power cord to a top of the line big $ cabie or jumped from a Bluetooth dac to a $5,000 high end one. That’s been my experience.

@audphile1   Ty. That makes total sense. It’s kinda what I also figured. Appreciate your response sir. 👍

"Cable break-in" is a clever excuse that expensive cable makers came up with. you don't find any audible difference just return it "next day" for a full refund before your brain wants to believe.

You certainly don’t require a nice HiFi system if you can’t hear the dramatic difference between my brand new Audioquest Dragon cords and my broken in demos of the same cords. To me the difference is blatantly obvious and my system took a dive with the new cords. But things have changed after a week. Still not where things were with the demo cords yet. Or maybe the evil scheming cable companies hand out superior cables for demos! There’s a new conspiracy theory.

The one thing that the cable companies may be guilty of is charging about 4X what it should cost to achieve decent margins. But I’m just an armchair critic; maybe their costs really do back up their prices. But if so I’d be surprised. It’s their high prices that fuel all the conspiracy theories.

A counter argument to my criticism of the high prices of audiophile grade cables is that if margins are truly over-inflated, then you’d expect that would create an opening for a giant killer company to swoop in and sell cables that perform like the very best at 25% of the cost.  And yet this hasn’t happened.  So maybe it can’t be done.

@ozzy , how long did you find it took for your Dragon source cords to fully break in?  I’m finding they seem to take longer than I recall my Hurricane cords taking.