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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