My take on Cable Cooking
And how it seems to work and what is ‘Better’ about using this process.
Recently, in another thread I mentioned, repeatedly, about the benefits of cooking USB cables and subsequently there were a few incredulous expressions of surprise…
So I figure I’ll present this overview of what I’ve learned, over the past few years, while using ‘cooked cables’.
What this Audio Dharma Cable Cooker does is throw current at the wires, and in enough quantity to ‘saturate’ the entire cable, in a sustained and continuously variable way, in order to ‘condition’ the conductors and non-conductors as well.
And in my research, the non-conductor(s) are as important, perhaps even more so, than the conductor(s), as strange as that may sound.
And since these cookers ‘condition’ both, and for a sufficient duration (10’s of hours), the entire cable is effectively ‘conditioned’.
Now let me give you my take on what ‘conditioning’ means.
What this device does is throw a swept square wave signal from 0Hz up to 40KHz (plus the full range of upper harmonics that square waves generate), back and forth at a set current, independent of the ‘load’ that the wires present.
What these signals are doing at these ‘elevated’ currents (120mA for signal wires & 1.88 Amps for speaker and ac power cables etc.) is essentially scrambling the 2 types of conductors, but especially the non-conductor, the dielectric material.
And by scrambling I mean erasing whatever their intrinsic electromagnetic and electrostatic nature is.
And this ties into my comments about break-in where the materials now performing their respective tasks are doing so for the first time after being assembled.
As such they are ‘acclimating’ to the sum total of the new electrical environment, that they were designed to operate in.
And these cookers accelerate and expand this acclimation process by using greater amounts of voltage and current than would normally be present on these cables
So in one case we have an analog signal with varying voltage and current flowing thru wires and in relatively small amounts, that can be rather dynamic in terms of voltage swings and involving complex harmonic patterns of both voltage and current.
And in another case we have a ‘fixed’ ac voltage with a non-regular pattern for current flow.
And these voltages and currents are establishing the ‘normal’ ranges of the amounts of the electrostatic and electromagnetic fields that these cables will be carrying while we use them in our systems.
So I figure these cookers are performing a master ‘reset’ of the voltage and current carrying properties of the cables.
Now I say this because I have experienced my cables, and multiples of them, both before and after being cooked and WAY later as well…
And thus far there hasn’t been a cable that doesn’t perform ‘
Better’ after being cooked.
A bold statement perhaps, but it is what I have observed.
And I’m not the only one who has come to this understanding.
In fact I wouldn’t have purchased the Shunyata cables if I hadn’t cooked them first.
Because while my modded ‘kit cables’ didn’t have the same degree of focus, they did allow the very bottom end to come thru.
And only after cooking did these $$$$ cables perform ‘
Better’ than my DIY’r special cables, in every way.
And yeah there are a couple of draw backs, to cooking cables, which are…
The cables loose their ‘magic’ after about a year and revert back to acting like normal cables again.
This of course simply won’t do, so all the cables need to be re-cooked, and on a regular basis to re-charge the invisible quantum invariant pixie dust, so tunes stay tweaked.
And 2, these cookers are spendy, like $1K for this industrial strength version.
And the cables still need to go thru break-in after being cooked.
So as far as the effectiveness of cooking cable goes, I find this process indispensable, that is if you are in pursuit of finding out just how far a set of 800’s can truly scale.
Is this going to an extreme?
Well I suppose so, but until you have experienced what cooked cables will do, well words will never fully convey what the net effect truly is.
But I can say that when the cables revert back to ‘stock’ condition, the realization can be somewhat ‘stark’ to say the least, as in the SQ goes flat and looses much of the dynamics and the very bottom end drys up and becomes a distant memory…
And to that end, if there are a few who’d like to experiment further, PM me and perhaps we can work out a way I can cook a cable or 2… for you to try.
JJ
