kemmler3D
Master Contributor
Totally true. I did once try to measure burn-in on some headphones, back when I was in the biz. I had a factory-fresh sample that I burned in overnight at high SPL. Then I measured it against a set that was fresh-fresh. While the measurements were different, I was placing the headphones on a MiniDSP EARS jig by hand, and the delta was on the order of 1dB. I do not offer this anecdote as evidence of anything.There is only one piece of audio equipment that requires break-in: woofers.
Everything else? No.
Woofers’ suspensions have a lot of excursion (unlike mids and tweeters). To get guy the suspensions to nominal compliance, you have to hit them with a strong signal that will stretch the suspension. A short burst around 80Hz from a tone generator or playback of one loud song will do it.
Done. The woofer is broken in.
Don’t believe me. Believe Andrew Jones (Chief Technology Officer for KEF, TAD/Pioneer, ELAC, MoFi). He explained this to that goof ball, Steve Guttenberg. Guttenberg was astonished and confused more than normal.
It doesn’t take weeks? No, it doesn’t.
The reason people think this is the case is because they feel the sound of the speaker is changing. It’s not. It’s actually their brain getting acclimated to the new sound. That’s it. The speaker remains the same.
Everything else people profess to need or improve due to “break-in” doesn’t. Again, rampant stupidity and ignorance being accepted as fact.
John Siau of Benchmark Media wrote me that people thinking his equipment was burning in were just getting used to equipment with much less distortion. Once you accept the new, better paradigm in sound, there is no going back.
Again, to the point of my previous post, your hearing just isn’t that good. It really isn’t.
My final thought is this: if all of your equipment needed to get broken in for weeks until it was at what would be considered it’s performance ideal, wouldn’t the manufacturer have to do all that break-in? If they didn’t, how would they know the equipment is even performing properly?
The whole notion of quality control would fly right out the window.
That said, our customers were convinced they needed many hours to burn-in. I did that test mainly to humor them. Undoubtedly it was just their ears / minds adjusting. Even if the measurement I got was real (it was a paper cone with flexible surround - not sheerly inconceivable) it would have been really hard to hear in a non-fast-switching A/B test, let alone day-to-day on the same set.
There is a really good reason to promote the idea of burn-in, though.
As you say, it's our brains adjusting to the sound of the new gear.
If people get something out of the box and don't like the sound, they might return it. If you convince them it needs "burn-in" instead, they'll spend many hours playing sound through it.
This will result in a dramatically lower return rate. One, because people adjust to the new sound and decide they like it after all. Two, because the longer people keep something in their house, the less likely they are to package it up and send it back. That's just a universal trait of shipped goods.
Convince them it needs >150h of burn-in to sound right, and among the people that do it, you should expect a tenth of a percent returns, if that.