Depends on the gear, materials it’s made from, etc… In general if you don’t burn in you won’t know if you need burn in.
1 Like
There is no such thing as “burn in”. There IS however “break in”. This is where the moving parts of a speaker driver loosen up as they are “exercised”. It’s easily and consistently measurable. The effect is a reduction in the resonance frequency (and hence the impedence peak shifts to a lower frequency). Long story short, the more you beat on the suspension of a speaker (the more the diaphram moves), the more pliable it becomes until it settles down to a point where it will remain consistent. There is no snake oil or mystical propaganda.
You can simulate the phenomenon with a new mattress. Jump on it for several years and you will notice the suspension (the springs) get looser. A speaker is the same but you don’t have to wait several years because a 20HZ (the slowest) note will move it 20 times in a single second.
Tomato tomahto lol
3 Likes
Semantics matter. Otherwise we’d be sitting on a table while eating our food off a chair 
And why is my hair always orange? Need some black hair…
1 Like
You could make a restaurant with that gimmick and there is a chance it would be successful lol
Not these days. Thanks rona…
From a material science standpoint, this is a real thing. Some manufacturers account for this by breaking in their products before they box them and ship them - although certainly not all manufacturers do so. There is legitimate debate about how much this change is truly audible. It’s also true that the human brain has to adjust to new sounds; mental burn-in, if you will. That part is not practically measureable with current technology. I mean, you could MRI or CAT scan someone while listening, but then anything magnetic is out of the question… Anyway, there is both mental and physical burn-in or break-in. How much the physical is actually detectable to the human ear is unclear. I hypothesize that mental break-in has a much, much bigger effect than physical break-in.
EDIT: I’ll add that if a person has been listening to the same pair of headphones/speakers for days, or weeks, or months, and claims they sound better after “break-in”, it is impossible to say whether that better sound is the result of their brain acclimating or the physically moving parts loosening up. My understanding is FR measurements at least don’t change very much between a brand new headphone and that same headphone after a couple hundred hours of use. But, I could be wrong about that too.
1 Like
It’s very possible. I don’t have enough knowledge in that area to comment.
1 Like
The brain does weird shit with perception. For example, the image of your own hand your eye physically projects on the optic nerve when your arm is bent at 90 degrees is 11 times larger than the image of your hand when your arm is fully extended. The brain does some virtuoso-level processing to translate those two images into what you see. And that’s before you even get into how our brains can make sense of symbols and recognize them as letters or words or number, or make sense of photographs and TV screens…all kinds of pattern-recognition going on there. Moreoever, that’s all optical processing which our brains are much better at than audio processing.
2 Likes
Case point: HP-3 and Ether CX. Very lengthy and noticeable break in. Koss kph30i and Abyss Diana Phi, I didn’t notice any break in really.
As Wave said, materials science dictates. Comparing two headphones is literally like comparing Apples and Iron blocks from a materials perspective.
Burning-in is just an expression because “we” used to use tubes for everything. And tubes were well, literally burning in. We’re not literally “putting the carts before the horses” either.
Burn in, break in, wear in, etc., while they don’t technically mean the same thing at this point in this case they mostly are used interchangeably
2 Likes
Tubes… burn in.
Speakers, break in.
I tried to burn in my pair of DT 177X GO, instead they burned my hearing 
3 Likes
Do believe in “break in” when it comes to certian drivers. For example anything Bio-cellulose and all of Dan Clark Audio’s headphones that I have tried benefited/improved sonically after a break in period. On the other hand, Audeze headphones as well as Sennheiser headphones that I have tried/owned did not change anything sonically after a break in period.
Hmm your experience with the Senns is much different from mine. My HD600 took a month to have any semblance of bass.
No when headphones sound amazing to me they do from the first song when they sound like sheet they will even after a month, the only thing that changes for me is that I get used to the sound and with time it’s not as special anymore, so if I don’t use that headphone for like a week when I use it again I remember how special they are.
From my experience and from what I hear, a properly bad headphone will not become a great headphone from break in. Even in the most noticeable example I have (the TR-X00 PH) the changes where subtle. The bass got a touch cleaner and maybe the highs a smoother. The frequency responce didn’t really change but the technicalities improved a bit. In general break in is not really a big concern. Like you said, if you don’t like it then chances are break in won’t help.
Every speaker that I owned new that had mylar membranes certainly did have a break-in.
Every woofer/subwoofer + cabinet I built had break-in.
The only new can I ever tested did. The HE6se. Ran it with fairly loud program music for 10 hours. Listen to HE-500 for an hour, the 6se for an hour, then HEX v2 for an hour, take notes, run the 6se for 10 more hours - w/o listening, then repeat the interlude. Found some changes at 30 and 40 hours, notable one at 90.
If I had just listened to the 6se all the way, I wouldn’t have anything to anchor my opinion on, and the fact is, its a better can then the other two, and fairly high chance if I heard a difference, it would have been muted due to familiarity - unless it was an epic, and it wasn’t.
Maggie MG 1, II, 3.3; ML CLS IIz, Aerius i, SL-3, Vantage
12 woofer/subwoofer boxes w/ driver(s), some ported, some push pull, some slave driver - all of them had significant increase in excursion, and change in sound, and measured output over time.
Capacitors too, but lets not overload the topic.
Almost all cans have mylar or an excursion. Maybe we ought to test that when we can.
Every mechanical thing breaks in over time. Your car, your speakers, your headphones. Hell, clothes and shoes aren’t even mechanical and they break in.
It’s a physical thing that moves and/or interacts with the world in any way, therefore it will break in. This is how a driver will eventually fail once it’s “broken in” too much.
The only question when it comes to audio is whether or not a difference in sound can be heard due to the break in. This depends on the headphones and the listener’s ability to critically listen. When all is said and done it is a case by case sort of thing.
2 Likes