Yes, it's hard, tedious work. The good news is once you're done, find what you like, you don't have to go through it again for years as suggested above. As I built my system I used perfectly acceptable $200-$300 ICs for my 'major' components. Now that the system is 'done', I just wanted to dial-in the last bit of resolution and (yes) freq balance to my liking. But going through about 20 $300-$1000 ICs takes a LOT of time, esp as I was generally intentionally auditioning cables that had similar characteristics.
The Cable Company is both a blessing and a curse. My 'salesman' was incredibly knowledgeable and patient, helping me narrow things down considerably. They have every cable made, a reasonable (?) lease cost, all cables fully burned-in, painfree return shipping labels, but before you know it you've spent $400 just to audition. At least the price can be fully credited to buying a new or used cable from them at a fair, if not audiogon, price.
I can do up to 90min at a time, at the expense of getting on with my life. I have about a dozen CDs and a dozen LPs I use and know what to listen for. I tend to cover as much ground as I can in an intense listening session, rather than just listening to a particular cable for days more casually. Some of this may be the 2wk time limit of The Cable Co, a lot of it is I just want to get it over with. So it's usually one track I'll listen to once or twice before switching to a different cable. I can only compare one cable to another at a time, so I have to carefully choose the order in which I stage the cables, and can quickly narrow down to the favorites A/Bing against each other. I take copious notes (what a surprise) so I don't have to repeat a comparison unnecessarily.
The good news is I have found the 'perfect' ICs I was looking for to fit my system/ears/preferences (if not budget!) which takes the whole system an appreciable step beyond what the previous (decent) cables did. And learned a lot about many of the popular current cables available today. The bad news is I could have accomplished a lot more useful stuff (and saved a lot of money) in the hours and months it took to get to where I am now -- but we can all make that claim in this hobby. I don't know that I could have short-cutted the process and have the same level of confidence that I didn't hear cable XYZ that has such great press against my final choices.
The only thing 'worse' I can think of is auditioning power cords, which I did only enough of to replace all my generic IEC cords with $50-$200 cords -- relatively cheap -- with an absolute minimum of critical auditioning. YMMV of course.
