Give it six months

The equipment you just acquired always sounds better than what you had. It is new, it is exciting, and your attention is heightened. Give it six months and suddenly it is just your system.

That is recency bias, and no amount of time in this hobby makes you immune. The first weeks with a component are the worst weeks to judge it, because you are listening harder than you ever listened to the old one. The honest comparison starts when the excitement has gone.

The same trap hides inside burn-in. For speakers it is real: the suspensions and drivers do need to loosen, and that is mechanical fact. For electronics it is more debatable, though capacitors do stabilise over time.

Let me be clear about cables. I have never been able to reliably identify cable burn-in separate from my own brain burning into the sound. Sometimes equipment sounds better after a while and sometimes my ears have simply adjusted, and admitting that is worth more than a firm position either way.

Six months is the cheapest listening test there is. It costs nothing but patience, and new gear never ships with any.