I hope break in is true

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,

This disc simply consists of several different wide-bandwidth, high average power signals. It shouldn't hurt a line level tube any more than it would a transistor.

As to the cabling, you've got to use some type of "cable cooker", whether it is a commercially available product or "home brew" means very little. Getting the voltage up and using a broad-band signal is what counts. Sean
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I just received my new merlin monitors. I`m wondering if the ayre breakin cd would be too poweerful for a single 6" woofer.

Capt: It's not that the disc is "too powerful" for any specific speaker or system, it's that it contains a high quantity of both very high and very low frequency information. So long as you keep the volume down, you shouldn't have any problems. Just don't forget about the first 5 seconds of silence on the disc before it starts with a 5 Hz tone. Cranking up the volume because you're a couple of seconds into the disc and don't hear anything can be fatal to a vented woofer. Sealed designs have built in protection when it comes to this as they have "built in" damping, which reduces the potential for over-excursion to take place.

If the woofer starts flapping like mad, which it will at very low frequencies, simply back the volume down. Having said that, the whole idea is to exercise the suspension of the drivers, so the more movement that you can get them to make in a safe manner, the quicker the break-in will be. Sean
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Disregard my last post. On reflection, I realized all you have to do is keep the volume at an appropriately lower volume. Sheesh!

I`ll now go bang my head against a wall. I`ll relate to all how many head bangs it takes for brain break-in. :)