Interconnect cable upgrade disapointment

Not your brand but every other cable I have tried needed at least 150 hours to come up. If your jumping levels....the improvement should be apparent right away...if only upgrading to the newer version...then the breakin is needed. A synergy with the same cable line is important....if one cable is a mismatch with the others...that might limit your overall gain.

The break in time is determined by how long it takes you to believe that there is a change. This is because there is no actual change between 1 minute and 2000 hours of use. Change likely will occur after many years, decades, centuries, or millenia due to disintegration of the materials.

Sorry I missed that part on you having XLR Ics.

The cable burner idea is a good one, if you don’t mind the expense for something you only use once a year or so for a few days, maybe. It would be handy in any case though.

Of course there are adapters too which make XLR into RCA and cost around $8 a pair. Your XLRs could then be plugged into another setup easily.

The cables which I’ve seen requiring more time than others are those ‘brand new’ sorts. Other preowned cables only need time to be “re-loosened” up, as I call it. The significant time or the more important time is that period where the cable has to be attached to the two items it’ll hang out with until it’s replaced. I call it the “getting acquainted” period. That should not take more than a day and likely, less.

There are lots of pro XLR cables around really cheap. $20 per pair or so. Having a set of them around and exchanging them with your more expensive ones will no doubt prove some things to you as to cable performance. Same thing with RCA cables. Radio Shak has loads for way cheap. I suggest the Rat Shak as the build.connectors are usually a tad better than the ones supplied with mass fi items and again, should prove or disprove the aspect of cables performance, run in, etc.

My exp, and more importantly, my ears, have shown me there is something to the fact of run in times, getting accquaitned time, and one level of cabling over another. There are those who do not hear any substantive diffs. I wish I was in that camp, and RAT SHAK wires would be draped all over the rear of my rack instead of what’s hanging there now… and I’d enjoy the savings… trust me on that!!

To give some substance that differing cables, both brand and model do have differing
Characteristics, and therefore sounds, I thought I’d do an A – B test and see for myself, once and for all! I’ve never had items with remote control that could provide me such a testing base. It came to last night that I did, so my curiosity got the better of me and I did my test.

I hooked up two devices. A receiver and my DAC. The DAC has two sets of analog outputs. Once connected and a source selected, and with no changes anywhere else in the system, and setting the receiver to use no EQ or DSP effects for either selection, all I had to do to select either pair of ICs was to push a button on the remote.

All else in the signal path was exactly the same. Same amp, same speakers, same source. Only the two different pair of analog ICs were the difference.

The ics being A – B’d, were Nirvana SX Ltd., and HT Magic IIs. Clearly, unless someone is tone deaf, there were audible diffs, in tonality, and sound stage. More noticeable in the former than in the latter, yet in sound stage too there were changes.

Why?

Cables conduct signals. Electricity. The issues with conductance are simple…
impedance, capacitance, resistance, and inductance. EVERY cable has varying values of the aforementioned amounts.

I believe it is these values which aid or disparage the synergy of components. If it takes only a $10 pair of wires to do this for you, then that’s SUPER! If it takes $1000? Well that’s a drag by some accounts, and ridiculous by others’. I’m not real keen on the idea of spending loads on cables either, and won’t unless I hear what I want or desire from a cable as an improvement …. Not just different.

But there are diffs from one conductor to another. How much of that your gonna hear depends on your ears, the despairity of these amounts, and your rigs resolution.

To further prove that point, I’m very happy so far, with RAT Shak RCA cables for my DD 15 sub woofer use. I’m not happy with the power cord supplied with my subwoofer.
Changing only the power cord there is good enough for me. So perhaps there is another element in picking out conductors …. “what can you live with”?

I don’t hear the lower part of the bandwidth nearly as well as I do the rest of it. Under 50 hz gets real tough for me to discern, and certainly under 40 for sure. There all I need is impact so the signal cable I require doesn’t have to be as articulate. .. and consequently, it’s not expensive.

First impression is usually correct. If you don't notice immediate difference when you changed something, there probably was little or no change. If there is a slight change in nuance that can be noticed only with extended listening, then you'll need to decide whether the change is worth the cost of the new gear.

I have different philosophy with swapping cables than swapping components. Swapping cables is more like a tweak, or something fun you can do on the side. I would first start swapping cables with friends and establish a baseline as for what kind and how much change can be expected. Going to different brands is usually more noticeable even at the same price range. Change in the speaker cables is usually more noticeable than change in interconnects. If you are rather skeptical or don't find the whole process fun, I would recommend saving money and upgrade other components instead.

Whatever you paid for the cables seems to me to just be tuition for a good lesson - that if the people posting who have scientific backgrounds point to the lack of proof of any meaningful gain from a product, and if the only place that does point to a meaninful gain are the manufacturers - while the non audiophile community pretty much looks at the justification as on par with aliens, ufo's, and the Yeti (which they do) then there may be more to that viewpoint than to the "it just sounds better" viewpoint of those who are selling the product or who are trying to justify their purchases to themselves.

It should just be common sense that the 'break in' for cables is just more of the same, kind of like warming up the ouiji board for better spirit contact because it takes time, depending on atmospheric conditions, to form the invisible ectoplasm pathway. Of course, the tuition has only been well spent if the lesson has been learned.