Recommended Component 2025 – Stereophile
"Don't Dismiss It Until You Try It." - Stereophile
System-Enhancing Burn-in and Test CD
The Irrational, But Efficacious! test CD from Ayre is will enhance your listening enjoyment by improving your audio system.
"I 'treat' my system with Ayre’s Irrational, But Efficacious!! glide-tone disc – another tweak that I was convinced would make no difference whatsoever, but that removed several layers of grunge whether I believed in it or not," said Stereophile's Wes Phillips when this product first came out.
"Recommended Component" Honors
Stereophile honored Irrational, But Efficacious! CD by awarding it the magazine's coveted Recommend Component status for 2025.
According to Stereophile, "The disc produced a less electronic sound in JM's system, while lowering the noise floor and improving microdynamics. 'I am flabbergasted,' said he. 'Highly recommended.'"
"Don't dismiss it until you try it."
Fine-minute Glide Tone
The main tool is a five-minute glide tone, that when played through your system at a moderately low volume, will improve its sound. Ayre reports that the tone helps demagnetize residual fields that build up in your components over time.
The other tracks have more specialized functions and feature white noise, pink noise, brown noise, etc. All tracks were created digitally with 88.2 kHz, 32-bit resolution. Enhanced resolution transfer to the 44.1 kHz, 16-bit CD format was performed using 0.5 bits of dither with a triangular probability distribution function for maximum fidelity.


