interesting experience recently. i moved my system around, and needed longer speaker cables (25'). I had been using Ocos, an 8' pair, and liked it, but it's no longer available. i also needed something that was relatively small in diameter so i could run it either under my rug, or run it under the floor, via the basement. just to get things up and running i bought some inexpensive monoprice 12 gauge speaker wire, which sounded ok, but rather raw. it did improve a bit after the first week or so, but still pretty rough.
then i found a dealer who still had some Ocos, and could make a 25' pair. it was expensive, but exactly what i thought i wanted, so I took the plunge. when i first hooked it up, it sounded ok, definitely not as rough as the monoprice, but also very flat sounding, almost lifeless and devoid of dynamics. figured it needed to burn in, so i left it alone and tried not to listen critically. two weeks in, and it still sounded broken, and the right speaker sounded much louder, with the image skewed to that side as well. granted, that speaker is in a corner, so you'd expect some emphasis on that speaker, but i'd never heard anything quite like this. i began to suspect that maybe they'd mis-terminated it, and the speakers were out of phase, so i swapped the +/- on one speaker. center image immediately improved, so i left it that way for a while, but it sounded disjointed, bass suffered, and i realized they'd been wired correctly after all. so i swapped +/- again, and voila! everything came into focus, center image remained, bass improved, tightened up now, not overly boomy like previously, and the sound had depth and space to it, and the sense of effortless openness and neutrality i associated with my prior pair of Ocos. by this time i'd been listening for a good 3 weeks, probably 75-100 hours. so yes, cable does change over time; whether that's "burn in" or some other term i can't say. -- 4 TB Drobo-->FW 800-->mac mini-->Ethernet Transporter--> Wireworld Eclipse 6 coax-->Meridian G61 G61--> Nordost Red Dawn-->Primare 30.3 Primare-->Ocos--Vienna Acoustics Beethoven/Maestro ------------------------------------------------------------------------ netchord's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=21002 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=103502 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
