I hope break in is true

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.

Fishboat: Your comments and observations are very consistent with those that i've noticed, along with others that i've talked to / shared this disc with. If you can, i would give it another week or so using the same routine. After about two weeks, especially with the speakers on, you'll really hear the difference. Everything simply sounds more relaxed, more natural and less "forced". That is, the system, and the presentation, sound more at ease making music.

As to your cabling, there's nothing that you can do with your system that will fully break it in. It does not matter how loud you play something or how long you play it for, the cables will never fully do their thing until properly "conditioned". You have to get the voltage up on the cables WAY beyond what they would ever see in normal use, which is impossible when using them normally within the confines of said system. Using a wide bandwidth signal works quite well.

As for your speakers, foam surrounds take time to loosen up. The more that you throttle the woofers, the sooner that they will loosen up. You might not believe this, but the sound will change even though the other parts of the speaker suspension are quite aged. It took almost 6+ months of daily use on a set of my speakers that were refoamed to fully settle in. It sounded very odd, but all of a sudden, the bass just seemed to "bloom".

As far as your room acoustics go and the way that the image walks around / floats in the room, that is a pretty freaky thing, huh? Something that i like to have people do is to sit in the "sweet spot" and close their eyes. I ask them to focus their ears by pointing their head in the location of where the sound seems to be emanting from with their eyes still closed. The more movement that you have to make with your head, the less stable the imaging is and / or image stability is as frequency is varied. Since this is basically a "dual mono" stereo recording, one would ideally want to be able to keep their head "centered" between the speakers. Good luck doing that with most installations : )

With one system that we did this to, it almost looked like the guy was watching a high speed tennis match. His head was up and down, side to side, all over the place. His head was moving about so fast and so often that i started to laugh.

Needless to say, he knew that he had a lot of work to do on his speaker / room interphase after hearing / experiencing this. His system sounds a LOT better now even though the image does NOT stay perfectly centered. This is pretty normal though due to production tolerances in the speakers themselves and / or specific room anomalies that are difficult to deal with. Do the best that you can in this area and then relax. One might be surprised at how good a basic, yet well installed, system can do at "holographic" imaging at this point.

Don't forget, not only are you hearing the acoustics of your room, but also how the speakers themselves load into the room. As such, changing their placement can have "almost" as much effect as treating one's room. Obviously, this would depend on how bad the acoustics of the room are and / or how far off optimal the speaker placement was to begin with.

I would suggest playing the Ayre disc on repeat 2 - 3 times every so often. I don't know how or why it does it, but it almost seems like it cleans out some of the "congestion" that builds up within a system.

Other than that, thanks for sharing your results with us. It would be great if you, and others performing similar tasks, would continue to post further observations over time. Having one thread like this to read / compare notes with would be kind of a nice thing. Sean
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Sean,

Thanks for your thoughts. With regard to your cabling comments, what would you suggest to break them in? I've heard mention of "cable cookers" though haven't looked beyond that to understand what they are.

Regarding the center imaging...my image didn't move around that much. The speakers are moderately towed in and about 12-16 (inside corners) inches off the back wall per the Snell setup instructions. The setup isn't optimized yet as I think I need to tame to room down before an optimium can be heard/identified. The equipment is in the balcony of a vaulted ceiling over the living room. Plenty of slap echo with a moderate amount of rinnngggg. The long sweep tone did get louder or quieter quite a bit as the sweep tone increased in frequency(sort of a warble). I assume this is the room nodes showing themselves as a function of frequency....indicating the work needed on treatment.

I'll spin the disc up for another week and see where things go. Any thoughts on what this disk may do to tubes? I have a couple sets of different tubes for the pre & CDP that I'd like to try. Maybe I better install them after the next period on the disc.

thanks,