You are very right with regard to silver break in time. I have used the silver Dragon, ALO SXC, ALO silver, Whiplash TWag v1, and recently the Crystal Piccolino. Craig recently told me that the new TWag V2 is an entirely different animal
after 1000 hours of burn in. My TWag V1 took 300 to 500 hours.
Another important bit of info to remember with silver is that there are many qualities and types of implementation with silver, so one has to be very careful, I find there is no universal character for them. For instance, you have silver plated copper, you have solid and multi strand silver, you have silver ranging from 2n to 6N in quality (that is 99.99 to 99.999995). You have OCC silver. There are differences between coax and twisted construction style. Low quality silver tends to sound bright, thin, and harsh though may appear revealing. Low end silver can induce listener fatigue more easily due to their harsh nature. High end silver with proprietary technology and implementation tends to be very expensive. For instance, a pair of top of the line Crystal Cable for speaker can top $15,000.00 per pair. High end silver cable for headphone applications are few. One silver cable can be totally different from another silver cable in terms of SQ. They may range from having very thin and weak bass to tight and pronounce bass. Many silver cable brands do not fully reveal there silver composition so a buyer really has no way to evaluate them on paper and if they don't have good return policy, a buyer may end up getting stuck with an expensive cable. The best way is to audition yourself if at all possible.
