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Caladan Break-in

This is the voice of experience speaking…. Caladan speakers are like a fine wine, they get better with time – with break-in time.  My Caladans are much better now than when they came out of the boxes, and the improvements are well worth waiting for!

They also benefit from the right type of break-in. I talked to designer Clayton Shaw by phone, and he told me that the best approach is to run them several times at fairly loud volume levels (while your spouse is at the grocery store) for 30 minutes or so. Not “crazy high volume,” but louder than you normally listen to. He felt that these high-volume sessions help the cause more than playing them for 24 hours at low volume levels.

I posted “My Caladan Impressions” here a few weeks ago: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/my-caladan-impressons 

At that time, my Caladans had 160 hours on them, but 120 of those were at low volume, 24 hours per day. From 120 hours on, I did several sessions using Clayton’s suggestion and it really did help the process. I now have around 200 hours on them, and they continue to improve. They are even better now – to a noticeable degree – than they were when I posted my impressions. These very impressive speakers. Your patience will be rewarded!

wester17
ricevs
1,543 posts
 

1. Put the speakers directly face to face

2. Wire one of them out of phase relative to the other.

3. Play a 10 to 20 cycle tone (sine wave). Continuous play.....or use a signal generator.

4. Turn the volume up till the woofs are moving a lot but not distorting.

5. Do this for 100 plus hours (4 days or more straight).

6, Enjoy

You will not hear the speaker while doing this. The tone is really too low to hear....but mainly, the cancellation of the wave via inverting makes it have no sound.

This will not hurt the tweeter as it is crossed over at 12 db per octave at 1000 cycles........However, if you are a conservative type then you can desoler the red wire going into the tweeter.  From a pic shown here it is in plain sight and would take 10 seconds to desolder or resolder.

What you want is for the woofs to move....since its the suspension/spyder that need loosening up.

The above will take you most of the way there....but the tweeter, wiring, caps, resistor and coils still need higher frequencies to make the most love (please, burn me in, baby).....so, play them loud occasionally with full range music.

dz13
241 posts
 

As I posted in another thread, Clayton's speakers for Spatial Audio Lab needed 300 - 400 hours to really break in so be patient.

Ag insider logo xs@2x
puppyt
97 posts
 

I am just becoming aware of these speakers and am definitely intrigued. I watched the New Record Day video on You Tube; the sound was pretty impressive even with the inherent limitations of listening to music in that format. One question stands out to me. The music Ron played was pretty cool but seemed like the typical audio show fare; one or two instruments to highlight the low end or some other feature. What I want to know is what do these speakers sound like when a full band is playing?  How do they perform when playing Zeppelin, the Eagles, Al Green, Petty etc. and other mainstream classic rock/soul?  I would love to hear from anyone who has tested the Caladans with this kind of music.  Also, do they perform as well with vinyl vs streaming?

Thanks in advance for any impressions people might have.

@puppyt 

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