Warranty is void if speakers are exposed to "indirect sunlight." I guess they have to be used in a windowless room of at least 35% relative humidity. Ridiculous.
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250 hours and 5 day ‘settling in’!
- Thread starter Purité Audio
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Targeting the vampire market?
This must explain why old men in their 70's can hear stuff that analysers and people in their 20's cannot, they have properly run their ears in with decades of audiophile jazz, plus old men don't move about much.Yep, that's called burning ears in...
invaderzim
Senior Member
If they did the burn-in then you wouldn't get to experience the magic of the bad quantum particles leaving the cabinets.
I've heard of companies claiming the burn-in period before for equipment but I have never seen one that said you have to start the time over again if you move the speakers. So apparently any movement triggers a reset in the speakers break-in process
True. Probably should have said it is a gentler way of saying it. I guess when buying nearly $5,000 desktop speakers they figure people prefer talk of magic rather than the common sense of telling people not to just swap out speakers and make a rush judgment on if you like them or not.
Their customer service replies have to be fun
"Have you had them on for 250 hours? No, then let us know when you have"
"Okay, so now you've had them on for 250 hours and you still aren't happy? Did you move them in that time? Oh, then you have to start the time over"
"You didn't move them? Then try moving them. Let us know in another 250 hours. You may need to move them again though."
Hugo9000
Addicted to Fun and Learning
Perhaps they interpret the act of moving the speakers around to mean that the customer is unsatisfied and is trying to find a position where the speakers don't sound like total shit. "The customer is trying to find the exact right location for our speakers! He is in full critical mode, must not let him think he can make a judgment! Must burn in again!"If they did the burn-in then you wouldn't get to experience the magic of the bad quantum particles leaving the cabinets.
I've heard of companies claiming the burn-in period before for equipment but I have never seen one that said you have to start the time over again if you move the speakers. So apparently any movement triggers a reset in the speakers break-in process
True. Probably should have said it is a gentler way of saying it. I guess when buying nearly $5,000 desktop speakers they figure people prefer talk of magic rather than the common sense of telling people not to just swap out speakers and make a rush judgment on if you like them or not.
Their customer service replies have to be fun
"Have you had them on for 250 hours? No, then let us know when you have"
"Okay, so now you've had them on for 250 hours and you still aren't happy? Did you move them in that time? Oh, then you have to start the time over"
"You didn't move them? Then try moving them. Let us know in another 250 hours. You may need to move them again though."
It takes longer than this for Stockholm syndrome to kick it...
With their frequency response, it would surprise me if one ever found the right location.Perhaps they interpret the act of moving the speakers around to mean that the customer is unsatisfied and is trying to find a position where the speakers don't sound like total shit. "The customer is trying to find the exact right location for our speakers! He is in full critical mode, must not let him think he can make a judgment! Must burn in again!"
And yet, and yet, they sell. What does that say about 'audiophile' buyers? My old forum, HiFi Wigwam, has a
whole thread running about how wonderful they are.
S
SemperUnum
Member
And the sound always gets better in those reviews, it never seems to get worse.
This might imply that the brain is pretty good at adjusting itself to a new acoustic environment.
invaderzim
Senior Member
With their frequency response, it would surprise me if one ever found the right location.
And yet, and yet, they sell. What does that say about 'audiophile' buyers? My old forum, HiFi Wigwam, has a
whole thread running about how wonderful they are.
S
Herd mentality feeds expectation bias which then propagates the herd mentality and on and on.
Yes and there should be drugs provided to accelerate this process.
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And it looks like no warranty on drivers!
DDF
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Dick Pierce posted on rec.audio in '93(?) that break in occurs in the first few minutes and is mostly due to the varnish breaking in on spiders. Any changes afterwards are due to hysteresis in suspension parts or heating, not break in.
Okay, so now here is a question that I posted on the last page. Wouldn't this break-in period occur during quality control in the factory? Are there not multiple passes of QC or is there just one quick check and that's it, it's shipped out to consumers?
Still don't know how it benefits the manufacturers to ship out a product that is not representative of final (best) performance but rather the opposite which then must improve after (x) number of hours. That makes no sense to me.
Mea Culpa ...
Back in the days I bought a XLO burn-in CD...
After a day of burn-in... my soundstage became larger, I had more texture, more dimensionality , the background became so black I had to turn on the light to see where I was going even during the day, the sound was more organic ....
Back in the days I bought a XLO burn-in CD
... After a day of burn-in... my soundstage became larger, I had more texture, more dimensionality , the background became so black I had to turn on the light to see where I was going even during the day, the sound was more organic ....
I am most definitely not up on current manufacturing standards. I know Revel does final checks to ensure each speaker matches a target curve. Back when I was "in the biz" final checks were all over the map. Most involved a quick (few seconds) frequency response sweep and out the door they went. A few had test rooms full of speakers playing pink noise for an hour to a day followed by a final check (usually a frequency sweep again). I actually don't recall much between; back then (80's) the vast majority of final checks were very quick. There was also some driver testing prior to that (to ensure good drivers were going into the speakers) but again those tended to be very quick in terms of how long the test signals were applied. Most did not do full-power tests so there was almost always some "break-in" for new owners.
You must also remember that, despite grandiose claims, the changes tend to be small and subtle, and most often in the lower bass where you are unlikely to hear much change.
FWIWFM - Don
I recall visiting Burmester in Berlin and seeing a large room filled with racks of shelving full of naked cone drivers all being constantly driven at low frequency for days before being selected for the construction of their systems.
DDF
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For high capacity loudspeaker production, an efficient manufacturing process performs a quick rub and buzz test and perhaps frequency response. It cost dollars to extend test time. For an example, see the Klippel analyzer (there are of course other QC test options available).
Loudspeaker driver break in is one time and quick. It has a marginal impact on lower frequency alignment for a woofer (compliance and therefore low frequency alignment) which is swamped by room response variations and perhaps for a mid a similar change that may causes a very slight temporary one time shift in crossover alignment. A proper design targets broken in drivers and the break in occurs very quickly (minutes).
The heating and hysteresis effects are natural for any mechanical transducer and a good designer will ensure the effect is limited and within the operating parameters of the speaker. That is it works as intended with short term easy or long term hard use.
If a piece of electronics has a significant "break in" over time, then its a bad design and insufficiently controlling temp coefficient effects. I've designed analog electronics for commercial application to have very stable thermal and ageing characteristics, and it takes careful device selection, modeling and testing (ie work, not boutique thinking).
99.9% of what you hear reported as break in is human adaptation (or self delusion) and has nothing to do with changes in the gear.
My past life was almost exclusively involved with professional Broadcast electronics, and there was never a single instance of a manufacturer stating any 'break in' time or anything of the sort. No professional user would be the least bit impressed if told that what they bought wouldn't work properly for a number of hours. It would immediately ring alarm bells as to stability. Why 'audiophiles' accept any less is a mystery to me, all part, I suppose, of creating a mystique that audiophile products transcend science and engineering.
S.
I have designed a lot of military electronics. Telling the pilot to wait a bit for the radar to break in before scanning for an incoming missile would go over... poorly. To me something that needs excessive break-in or warmup time is a bad design.
invaderzim
Senior Member
That is what I'm seeing more. It is also a world where they are 'in-the-know' because they understand all these things that mere mortals do not. They know how silver wire sounds and comprehend break in times and how the really good components sound better after they've been on for several hours.
It seems somewhat similar to the off the deep end conspiracy theory types with 'I feel bad for you that you don't understand that there is so much we don't understand about how all of this works. I wish I could help you to hear what I hear as the electrons move more happily through this wire compared to that wire.' If one understands just enough about something they can let their mind wander and come up with all sorts of other things that have no basis in fact.
I don't know engineering, I can't do the math required to design or improve on the design of an amplifier but I can certainly change out the wire, capacitors, connectors or buy an add on to glue to the amp and be amazed at the results. And wonder how it just might have gone about making the improvement.
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