Orders. With the UPS tracker for three parcels came a separate email. "Should be plenty of lengths for all your configurations. I urge you to try all possible scenarios. While our Entropic Process doesn't do away with all burn-in effects, it certainly catapults them to extreme speed. In the first day or two, the sound will go through an obvious focusing period much like what happens right before your eyes when looking down a microscope and focusing on a cell's internal structure. What normally would take months and months to fully settle will take 3-5 days, with only very gradual refinements afterwards. This is a fascinating phenomenon and we would be very pleased if you'd focus your attention on what happens right at the beginning." I normally avoid break-in shenanigans. I ask the manufacturers to put their own requisite hours on so my system isn't tied up and out for 200 or (cough) 500 hours. Giving their thing a 24-hour dry run to acclimate before getting serious then is my contribution to the process. This time I wasn't just asked to sit through it. I was asked to pay attention and report on it. Orders. In writing. Okay, this once I could do a few days of it.

"It's accelerated aging which we primed our cables for. Based on what we gleaned over the years, it makes no sense for us to burn in cables in our facility when much of the effect mysteriously resets once the cable travels. Who knows what's fundamental here, the cable's crossing the Earth's magnetic field, changing orientation while in use or even stranger aspects of misunderstood energetic fields? We put everything we know into these to enable this pesky burn-in period to complete as quickly and effectively as possible."

"Contrary to common belief, it doesn't work like a simple on/off switch. It's almost as though something seeps slowly from the cables into the gear. Only once this 'something' has made its way through the gear and 'filled' the capacitors, traces and perhaps even circuit boards and dielectric materials surrounding the traces that we get stable performance. To make matters worse, it still seems that some remnants of whatever has seeped from the cables into the gear tends to remain there and stays effective for a while once the cables are removed again. In any event, thanks for the opportunity!" Tracking progress of Louis' three UPS cartons, I saw a path of Biruliskai in Lithuania ⇒ Wolka Kosowska in Poland ⇒ Stanford Le Hope and Tamworth in the UK ⇒ Finglas in Ireland just outside Dublin.

The first stash went into the upstairs system. Louis' 3m 20A-terminated C.MARC cord connected our Puritan Labs flagship AC/DC filter to the wall via Furutech plug. Four 1m leashes then sprouted from the Puritan into a Soundaware A280 SD card transport, JAVS X7-DAC MQA with Clean Power supply, Nagra Classic Preamp and Bakoon AMP-13R amplifier. The departing cords included Puritan's own to the wall plus four Crystal Cable mid-level silver/gold twisted leads. Speakers were our Acelec Model One aluminators topped by Franck Tchang magnesium omnipolar super tweeters plus…