Fair enough. You didn’t hurt my feelings btw. I hope I didn’t hurt yours.
Hurting tough is real. It can be felt physically and mentally.
Some might find it fun and enjoying as well.
If someone can’t take what is typed in overall content, not even pointed at them, not a personal message. Grow some balls.
Be a man and not this current “i feel bad society cause candy is red i can’t have none”.
I have heard about bad HFM QA but never experienced it. But I have experienced the bait and switch on the succeeding versions of the HE5SE, HE6SE - and the fraudulent claims made by HFM about both models origination/closeness to the originals. Also the same issue with the 560, which has been reported by and accepted as true (due to a 3rd rev, all with different physical characteristics). Commonality among the 3 headphones being the retailer - Adorama, and significant price drops.
I have found that MrSpeakers/Dan Clark Audio headphones greatly benefit from burn in. Same thing goes for biocellulose drivers in headphones such as the ZMF eikon, and the Fostex TH900. That’s about it. Most other headphones/headphone drivers I haven’t heard any major differences before and after burn in.
I have a question. These manufacturers that recommend burn-in for their headphones…
Could it be possible that they don’t believe in burning-in but want their clients to get used to the sound of the headphones before returning them? Or do they truly believe in it? Just saying…
It’s most likely a bit of both. Or they just might not take the time to burn them in after producing them to save costs lol
The burning in of the tuning filters made me literally laugh out loud.
lel, we need an iem discussion thread before we derail all the others
Leading on from the IEM burn in…I’ve changed between 3 set’s tonight Spring 1’s, Andro’s and 00’s all 3 I know, the 00’s least but It takes awhile to mentally adjust to each…00’s to Andro’s and I’m wtf but I mentally adjust and enjoy
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think the burning in of headphones was a myth invented by a secret body of manufacturers to discourage customers from returning their cans after a day … I’m pretty sure I’m right about that.
Honestly if that was true I would support it lol, I see too many people not give themselves enough time with something before they decide on what to do, you really can’t get a true feeling for something in a day imo
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.
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
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…
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.
It’s very possible. I don’t have enough knowledge in that area to comment.
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.
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.