I hope break in is true

Looks like MD sells both Ayre, Granite Audio, plus a Purist Audio Enhancer! 3 choices...

Thanks, guys!

Music Direct does stock these discs. If you are open to doing business with them, call and ask for Bes : )

As previously mentioned, the Ayre disc has several seconds of silence at the beginings of tracks 1 & 7. Do NOT crank up your volume thinking that something is wrong, otherwise you're going to pop something when the disc starts playing the 5 Hz tone at volume. Start off slow and work your volume up from there. This WILL give your woofers a massive work-out, especially below the point of port tuning on vented speakers. As the signal frequency rises, it also becomes easy to pop tweeters, so proceed with caution.

As a side note, sit in the sweet spot and listen to your system as it performs the "Cardas" sweep. Pretty interesting to see how the center image shifts as frequency is altered. This has to do with both the radiation pattern of the speakers and how it interacts with room loading characteristics. The more that the center image walks around, the more work you have to do on speaker placement and / or room treatments. Sean
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Picked up one of the ayre discs today...this should be interesting. I'll report back what I find.

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Well....I received the disc the day after I ordered it from music direct. I popped it in and ran it for a week through the electronics & about a third to half the time through the speakers also. The level is set via the first & fourth tracks (sweep tone & brown noise). The one track that is out of phase is a bit of a mind bender as you walk around the room. The 'warble' (constructive & destructive interference) I hear in the long sweep tone makes the work I need to do on the room acoustics 'audible' in an organized sort of way. I had the room treatments planned out already, but it'll be interesting to use this disc both before & after the treatments to hear the difference.

My setup was in various stages of 'break-in' with the ICs being just a week old, the CDP a year old, though it surely didn't have over 75 hours on it, tubes are NOS Raytheon 5751 grays. The speakers are 25 years old...I'm guessing they must have gotten broken in by now, though they have been refoamed in the last year. The basic system is a Jolida 100A CDP, TAD150 sig pre, McCormack DNA-1 deluxe, VH Audio silver IC's (DIY), braided Cat 5 biwire cables (VH Audio DIY design) into Snell Type Ai's.

While I'm pretty skeptical about many of the tweaks that get glowing reviews(though I thought the same about cables & IC's and I'm over that...they do matter) I have to admit the system does sound more relaxed/open, even though I thought it sounded very good before the disk. Probably the biggest difference is the sharp attack of BIll Evans or George Winston on the keys sounds more natural. Cymbals sound cleaner & seem to hang in the air longer too. Undoubtedly this impact carries over into other music/instruments. The sound change is hard to describe, but I think it's a definite improvement. The changes are enough that I'd buy the disc & do it all over again if I had to...I guess that's the ultimate test with something like this.