Do Audio Speakers Break-in?

[charleski]

It wasn't really an honest question, now was it? Don't act all surprised to get a cheeky answer to that post.

It’s a perfectly valid question, and one that’s bothered me as well. If we are to accept that the driver surround, spider and voice coil are changing significantly over time and there are also significant changes in the crossover’s capacitors and resistors, how on earth are we to conclude that the total system changes for the better? Especially when they will all be changing at different rates? Let’s say it does get better after a few months, what’s to stop the speaker then getting worse a few months later?

A speaker that requires ‘burn-in’ is one that’s fundamentally unreliable. All your ‘cheeky answer’ revealed is that you have no answer to this question.

 

[Night&Day]

It’s a perfectly valid question, and one that’s bothered me as well. If we are to accept that the driver surround, spider and voice coil are changing significantly over time and there are also significant changes in the crossover’s capacitors and resistors, how on earth are we to conclude that the total system changes for the better? Especially when they will all be changing at different rates? Let’s say it does get better after a few months, what’s to stop the speaker then getting worse a few months later?

A speaker that requires ‘burn-in’ is one that’s fundamentally unreliable. All your ‘cheeky answer’ revealed is that you have no answer to this question.

'Loudspeaker drivers are the only parts in a hi-fi system that change sound characteristics after a short period of use. The suspension consists of fibrous materials and elastomers that are anything but linearly elastic and i.a. exhibits significant creep, some of which is irreversible and leads to plastic deformation. After a period of use, however, the suspension parts stabilize towards their largely final shape via strain hardening and other hard-to-define processes, and this is usually considered as the loudspeaker driver being “broken in”.'.

 

[MattHooper]

And why do you think it was not a “honest” question.
You claim that speakers sound changes after a period of time, so I repeat the question: why always for the better.

I don't believe in the importance of speaker "burn in."

But IF we taking the idea, for sake-of-argument, that burn in of speakers etc is real and audible, I do think there is a fairly straightforward answer to your question.

The manufacturers who believe in burn-in finalize their design with "burned in" components. Hence their product should sound best, as it was designed, once the components have burned in to that state in your home.

 

[charleski]

The manufacturers who believe in burn-in finalize their design with "burned in" components. Hence their product should sound best, as it was designed, once the components have burned in to that state in your home.

But then why don’t they just sell them already burned-in? As I said before, we’re talking about components that have 4- or 5-figure price tags. At that level, dumping a bunch of speakers in a spare room and running them 24/7 for a while is hardly going to add much to the production cost.

 

[MattHooper]

But then why don’t they just sell them already burned-in? As I said before, we’re talking about components that have 4- or 5-figure price tags. At that level, dumping a bunch of speakers in a spare room and running them 24/7 for a while is hardly going to add much to the production cost.

I presume the answer would be that for many manufacturers that's not practical, given the amount of product they produce. So they rely on advising the customer on the issue (and the fact many audiophiles believe in burn in, so they are ready for this issue).

I know some manufacturers or sellers sell things "pre-burned in." For instance Upscale Audio sells tubes and they have a big tube burn in unit so "all tubes are pre-burned in." This helps them also justify higher prices. But I'd think it would be a hassle many manufacturers couldn't handle.

Again, not endorsing the reality of burn-in. Just giving the answers that you're likely to find from those who do.

 

[ozzy9832001]

I interpret burn in to be a term given by the manufactorer to say: please give our speakers a bit of time for you to get used to them...and maybe play with some EQ or the built in tone controls. I bet they get alot of returns because they don't "sound" right. This gives them an excuse.

To a small extent, they are correct. If you have been using one system for a long time, you know what to expect. A new system has more unknowns. Minor tweaks can go along way to improve the quality.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

And why do you think it was not a “honest” question.
You claim that speakers sound changes after a period of time, so I repeat the question: why always for the better.

And I repeat you should read the thread. Herein lies the answer. And your question is kinda wrong. And your comment was troll-like.

The answer is: It changes into what the parameters should be. -That's break in.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

It’s a perfectly valid question, and one that’s bothered me as well. If we are to accept that the driver surround, spider and voice coil are changing significantly over time and there are also significant changes in the crossover’s capacitors and resistors, how on earth are we to conclude that the total system changes for the better? Especially when they will all be changing at different rates? Let’s say it does get better after a few months, what’s to stop the speaker then getting worse a few months later?

A speaker that requires ‘burn-in’ is one that’s fundamentally unreliable. All your ‘cheeky answer’ revealed is that you have no answer to this question.

You should also try to read again.

• Break-in changes the parameters and properties so they meet the specifications.
• Break in and wear is not the same.
• It's not unreliable. It's mechanical. Mechanical and moving parts have break in. It's factual.
• My stupid answer was to a sarcastic post. And it was not revealing as the above points have already been made in the thread. What IS revealing is that people just popping up, inflating their ego by posting a sarcastic post that reveals they don't really have an honest interest in understanding the topic, nor perhaps learn, but to just stir the pot.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

I interpret burn in to be a term given by the manufactorer to say: please give our speakers a bit of time for you to get used to them...and maybe play with some EQ or the built in tone controls. I bet they get alot of returns because they don't "sound" right. This gives them an excuse.

To a small extent, they are correct. If you have been using one system for a long time, you know what to expect. A new system has more unknowns. Minor tweaks can go along way to improve the quality.

No need to interpret. Break-in changes parameters on a driver. But you are right. Manufacturers do this (1000 h break in time) to keep returns at bay.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

But then why don’t they just sell them already burned-in? As I said before, we’re talking about components that have 4- or 5-figure price tags. At that level, dumping a bunch of speakers in a spare room and running them 24/7 for a while is hardly going to add much to the production cost.

Are you kidding?
It is! -Electricity, the actual spare real estate for this, heating. It's money right out of the window (FOR THE OWNERS!) regardless the pricetag in the speaker. The owners would rather have that money spent by their own hands.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

View attachment 271751

'Loudspeaker drivers are the only parts in a hi-fi system that change sound characteristics after a short period of use. The suspension consists of fibrous materials and elastomers that are anything but linearly elastic and i.a. exhibits significant creep, some of which is irreversible and leads to plastic deformation. After a period of use, however, the suspension parts stabilize towards their largely final shape via strain hardening and other hard-to-define processes, and this is usually considered as the loudspeaker driver being “broken in”.'.

This needs a source.
Also: deltaT of 50 K is waay more than realistic.

 

[MAB]

We sure have strayed far from the original measurements in this thread, which demonstrated a speaker with inaudible break-in characteristics. If people have data that says OP is wrong and speakers audibly break in, please show it!
BTW, this isn't the only place where driver break-in has been discussed. See Toole:

Floyd E. Toole, Sound Reproduction - Loudspeakers and Rooms, Chapter 17 (this was referenced earlier in the thread)

The experiment Toole references here matches my experience; that break-in results in inaudible changes a worst. It certainly doesn't transform the sound, especially not uniformly making it better as claimed. I measure speakers all the time. I am usually interested in performance to published spec, but I have never remeasured a driver after use and found it different enough to hear unless it was worn out or broken (different than broken-in!!!). Most tested differences are due to ambient temperature changes. Most perceived differences are just that, perceived. And anecdotes that people have to turn subwoofers down by 3dB or more after break-in are absurd, please do the math first!!!

I replaced a soft-dome tweeter with a new diaphragm last month:

I measured the parameters right after assembly before first use. I then stressed the speaker for 10 seconds and remeasured. Then stressed for 50 seconds more (cumulative time 60 seconds). Then 240s, and 2 hours cumulative stress time, each with a long cool-down time prior to measurement. Then played music for a month. Throughout this, the parameters did not change in a way that is audible:

I do a cool-down because of the few measurements I ever see that claim to be break-in changes look more like temperature changes, or the test was done by someone who doesn't understand low impedance measurements, or both.

I also tested the FR and distortion for each readout:

I'm looking for any non-linearities in the supposedly stiff suspension causing distortion. I find none. The biggest change at one month is my ability to get the mic in the same position.

This isn't the first time I have measured no significant/audible changes with break-in. I was interested because I had never measured tweeter break-in quite as carefully and someone was telling me I had it all wrong and needed to measure a soft dome tweeter because 'tweeters actually change more than woofers and soft speakers change more than hard speakers' (really!!!)

 

[charleski]

You should also try to read again.

• Break-in changes the parameters and properties so they meet the specifications.
• Break in and wear is not the same.
• It's not unreliable. It's mechanical. Mechanical and moving parts have break in. It's factual.
• My stupid answer was to a sarcastic post. And it was not revealing as the above points have already been made in the thread. What IS revealing is that people just popping up, inflating their ego by posting a sarcastic post that reveals they don't really have an honest interest in understanding the topic, nor perhaps learn, but to just stir the pot.

Yet again you fail to answer the questions that have been raised.
If ‘break-in’ is required for a speaker to meet its spec how do manufacturers perform quality control at the factory? With multiple components aging at different rates and to different degrees how can they assure that the entire speaker ends up performing as desired?

‘Break-in’ and wear are very much the same thing. This whole ‘break-in’ myth for speakers was just borrowed wholesale from the need for break-in of car engines, in which the moving parts (operating at pressures and temperatures that far exceed anything you’ll find in a speaker) grind against each other and polish away asperities resulting from manufacturing imperfections. It used to be the case that car makers would sell new vehicles that didn’t meet their spec and owners were cautioned that running the car too hard early on might result in uneven wear on the pistons that would reduce the life of the engine. In other words, the engines were unreliable unless they were babied early on. Luckily, things are a lot better these days, since modern lubricants and the closer tolerances possible with modern manufacturing mean that modern engines need little more than a few hundred revolutions of ‘dead-running’ to spread the oil over all the surfaces and then about an hour or so in which it is run at successively higher revs. A decent manufacturer will do this at the factory before the car ships out.

High-end speakers can easily cost more than a car. If they still need ‘break-in’ then why are they so inferior in basic manufacturing practice?

 

[Deleted member 48726]

Yet again you fail to answer the questions that have been raised.
If ‘break-in’ is required for a speaker to meet its spec how do manufacturers perform quality control at the factory? With multiple components aging at different rates and to different degrees how can they assure that the entire speaker ends up performing as desired?

‘Break-in’ and wear are very much the same thing. This whole ‘break-in’ myth for speakers was just borrowed wholesale from the need for break-in of car engines, in which the moving parts (operating at pressures and temperatures that far exceed anything you’ll find in a speaker) grind against each other and polish away asperities resulting from manufacturing imperfections. It used to be the case that car makers would sell new vehicles that didn’t meet their spec and owners were cautioned that running the car too hard early on might result in uneven wear on the pistons that would reduce the life of the engine. In other words, the engines were unreliable unless they were babied early on. Luckily, things are a lot better these days, since modern lubricants and the closer tolerances possible with modern manufacturing mean that modern engines need little more than a few hundred revolutions of ‘dead-running’ to spread the oil over all the surfaces and then about an hour or so in which it is run at successively higher revs. A decent manufacturer will do this at the factory before the car ships out.

High-end speakers can easily cost more than a car. If they still need ‘break-in’ then why are they so inferior in basic manufacturing practice?

I would hope that expensive speakers are tested after assembly. But I bet that many aren't.

I'm simply stating that drivers break in. Especially woofers, where the T&S parameters change. -As witnessed by both driver manufacturer and measurements. It's up to either the speaker manufacturer or end customer to do the break in. Last mentioned may even not notice it. Especially when most manufacturers have some guideline on the subject.

 

[fpitas]

I'm simply stating that drivers break in. Especially woofers, where the T&S parameters change. -As witnessed by both driver manufacturer and measurements. It's up to either the speaker manufacturer or end customer to do the break in. Last mentioned may even not notice it. Especially when most manufacturers have some guideline on the subject.

Yes, I've seen a lot of test results showing that. Fs drops maybe 5% and the Vas increases about 10%, depending on the driver. I've also seen SIMs and testing that show the changes tend to cancel once the driver is in the enclosure. I've never seen credible evidence that purely electronic parts like caps, resistors or inductors as used in speakers change with use.

 

[YSC]

I would hope that expensive speakers are tested after assembly. But I bet that many aren't.

I'm simply stating that drivers break in. Especially woofers, where the T&S parameters change. -As witnessed by both driver manufacturer and measurements. It's up to either the speaker manufacturer or end customer to do the break in. Last mentioned may even not notice it. Especially when most manufacturers have some guideline on the subject.

If you are purely referring "break in" as any change with use, then everything breaks in, including you and me, but then:

1) Once inside a cabin and not operating free air, no credible data can show any meaningful difference, let alone audible
2) Temperature and humidity have a way higher influence to woofers than breaking in, see Amirm's review of the Neumann KH80DSP, in winter the bass have an obvius low shelf and that is in the potentially audible range, and yet I don't recall hearing anyone say "my speaker sounds crap in winter, and yet in summer it's much better"
3) Just as cars and myself, once past the fittest age/usage, we go downhill, and breaking in (wear) never stop, there is no practical meaningful for the magical break in as audiophiles refers to
4) as @MAB have shown above, his tweeter shows some difference brand new vs 1month, but that's more of measurement or environment variation rather than breaking in altering the surround.

Maybe we should be more clear, everything changes with usage and age, even the earth and rocks and concrete changes, but that is not what commonly refers to as "break in" in audiophile dictionary.

When "break in" means something like with 100 hours playtime the speaker will magically transformed into the magic performanc the engineer have predicted it to be and will sound better with time, which I think most ppl are referring to, does not exist out of marketing tactic to hold returns

 

[Night&Day]

This needs a source.
Also: deltaT of 50 K is waay more than realistic.

Accelerated Life and Power Testing

www.klippel.de

 

[Andretti60]

…
The answer is: It changes into what the parameters should be. -That's break in.

Bold answer, but you don’t show any proof. Whoever claim the breakin is real just say “it sounds better” but that is a personal opinion.
I personally have owned dozen of speakers/headphones in my life, I never saw any magical change after either 20 hours or 200 hours (that is my earlier sarcasm, it looks like there is no consensus on the duration of the breakin interval, just “good” numbers like 100, never 121) but I don’t use it as a “proof”, I just read the results of the tests (like @amirm did in this conversation), there are not many of them (it is not easy to do) but all show that the change in speaker parameters is away below the human perception. The parameters change much more depending on humidity and temperature, because the speaker suspension is made with rubber, and the rubber elasticity depends on the environment. And even in this case, there is no evidence that the change is audible. When I buy an elastic band, it is good to use just out of the box, there is no warning on the box label that warn me to stretch the band for some amount of time before using it.
You tell me to go and read the thread, another way to patronize the other people, who tells you that I didn’t. @amirm did a good job on his test, it is now up to you to show the opposite, but with a scientific experiment, not with bold claims or that the audio manufacturers say so. Audio manufacturers make a lot of claims just for marketing reasons. And there are also manufactures that don’t believe in breakin at all.

Knowledge base - Sennheiser

en-us.sennheiser.com

 

[MAB]

And I repeat you should read the thread. Herein lies the answer. And your question is kinda wrong. And your comment was troll-like.

The answer is: It changes into what the parameters should be. -That's break in.

Actually, you should go back and read the thread from the beginning. Perhaps you can explain why Amir's test that kicked this thread off is wrong. And CTRL's test that showed the same, wrong too? And mine, OK so it is a tweeter but people are always telling us that we just didn't test the right driver!!! So I did a tweeter, maybe I'll do a pair of new paper cone woofers next. The only data in this thread actually shows the opposite of what you are saying. Somehow I think I could test every driver under the sun showing no audible change and still not convince the believers who need drivers to break in for them to be special.
And Floyd Toole's book, referenced in this thread, also says the opposite. And even asks the same legitimate question that many other people have asked, that you seem to think are troll-like. Toole kinda lays it out real clear, Break-In is an audiophile thing, part of the cult's bag of carnival tricks that is audiophilia, and is not audible in any way and is barely measurable. Funny that in the experiment Toole referenced, the engineering teams were not surprised at the lack of change, the marketing team was surprised. I have to say, I am not surprised either.

 

[Deleted member 48726]

Actually, you should go back and read the thread from the beginning. Perhaps you can explain why Amir's test that kicked this thread off is wrong. And CTRL's test that showed the same, wrong too? And mine, OK so it is a tweeter but people are always telling us that we just didn't test the right driver!!! So I did a tweeter, maybe I'll do a pair of new paper cone woofers next. The only data in this thread actually shows the opposite of what you are saying. Somehow I think I could test every driver under the sun showing no audible change and still not convince the believers who need drivers to break in for them to be special.
And Floyd Toole's book, referenced in this thread, also says the opposite. And even asks the same legitimate question that many other people have asked, that you seem to think are troll-like. Toole kinda lays it out real clear, Break-In is an audiophile thing, part of the cult's bag of carnival tricks that is audiophilia, and is not audible in any way and is barely measurable. Funny that in the experiment Toole referenced, the engineering teams were not surprised at the lack of change, the marketing team was surprised. I have to say, I am not surprised either.

No you should!
Explain my links further up.
There is evidence either way. Don't get upset that your world isn't black or white.