I would expect that food scientists formulating mass produced snacks, soft drinks etc would use this kind of information. And then they could establish through subjective measurements how those technical measurements relate to preference. With that that they could attempt to make some relationships, improve the product, test again… repeat.
The good audio products gets tested, so they notice possible flaws or production errors. Maybe even figure out what was wrong and in what component, if there are more similar incidents. They know there is flaw in production or material. They will fix or change that.
Products should perform at optimum levels before consumer buys them, so no changes happen in sound.
It something would happen, it’s not in the product you bought.
Well, more on this. I was on the Focal site and saw this while in the Elegia product page:
"RUNNING-IN PERIOD
- These headphones require a running-in period in order to operate at their best.
- They will run themselves in naturally after several hours of listening time.
- If you want to speed up the process, we recommend playing very bassy music through them for at least 24 hours at a relatively high volume.
- This will stabilise the speaker drivers and allow you to get the very best out of your headphones."
So there you go. As previously mentioned, I did notice a significant improvement after several hours. I definitely think that in some cases, it is relevant, and in others, not so much.
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In my experience it depends on the product. Some brands you don’t need to worry about burn in like Schiit which does that as a means of quality control inspection before shipping their products. Sometimes burn in varies like with Dan Clark products; sometimes it is barely noticeable and other times it is a huge leap. I have experienced a night and day difference with burn-in like with my Meze Liric and my friend’s Meze Elite after just 10 hours. 100 hours of burn-in though is preposterous and just nonsense.
To me it is a case by case basis. Besides if after 10 hours of burn-in I am not impressed then I’ll take advantage of the retailer’s return policy. All I can say is I wish the poll had a case by case option.
Hello,
As always, it’s controversial.
Among my experiences that I can contribute are.
When I bought new headphones, they always worked a little worse in the beginning than afterwards.
It often took 20-50 hours before it got better.
The only headphones that sounded great right away were the Lcd 2 C.
I took them out of the box, plugged them in and they sounded magical.
All the other headphones I bought, Fostex, Denon, Aeon R/T, always took me a while to get used to.
The Denon D2000, which is now 10 years old, still runs better than my former Tr X00 - every time I put it on.
With consumer electronics I see it a little differently.
Most of the electronic devices were already satisfactory after 20 hours.
Recently I bought the Ifi Hip Dac 2.
Ifi also said to give it 100 hours.
It was so that the sound was a bit hard at the beginning.
After more than 50 hours I can say that it has improved for me, it is no longer hard, and the sound is also softer and somewhat deeper than before.
Subjectively, it wasn’t much, but it was audible, so something did happen.
With capacitors like Vcaps and the like, it’s a completely different story.
When I converted my Feliks Euforia to Vcaps, the 400h were really necessary.
During that time, I really went through a rollercoaster ride.
Sometimes it was ear fatigue, sometimes too sharp, sometimes it scratched occasionally or lacked flesh.
After 400 hours I can say that it is excellent and worth the rollercoaster ride.
And would do it again.
In the end, it has to be said that everyone should find their own measure of how they feel about burn-in.
Based purely on observation, 20-50 hours is usually enough for consumer electronics, and it’s not wrong to stick to this for headphones either.
It is not wrong and contributes to the cause.
It might be interesting at first, but now I hate it.
There is not really a recipe for doing a scientific burn in.
Everyone does it as they see fit.
I have developed my own method of doing something that I think is right for the product.
There are now also many manufacturers who incorporate this into their production processes.
Queststyle, for example, runs their amplifiers in for 100 hours and avoids amplifier failures.
Zmf also tests their headphones before shipping, even Denon with their D9200 do something similar.
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Okay, I have one right now:
TW: talk about burn-in (reader discretion is advised)
So I’m lurking in the Head-Fi watercooler because dudes talking about $4000 IEMs like they’re as accessible as $100 sets is weirdly fascinating. Someone was talking about the Campfire Trifecta and was like “it’s a 3DD, you need 150 hours of burn-in to get the sound where it’s supposed to be, and there are people selling it after their first listen. That’s weird.”
What I think is weird is a company selling a $3400 IEM that isn’t ready in it’s “best, as intended” state upon box opening. Nobody has said if CFA encourages or suggests this burn-in period (companies like Dunu do), and if they haven’t done so and it’s just what enthusiasts suggest, I’d drop this point dead.
But if CFA recommends 150 hours of burn-in (that’s a week, for the people not doing math), why are we accepting a TOTL $3400 IEM can be shipped to customers and it’s not ready to be listened to “as intended” until you run it for a week. Someone argued that it must be too much to manage logistically because they had a run of 333 units, and to burn those units in for a week, they’d have to charge more to figure out how to do it.
Yeah, and? It’s a $3400 IEM. If you charged $3800 with burn-in assumed and baked into the price, was anybody who bought it new for $3400 going to honestly not buy it at $3800 now?
Much like with Dunu selling 300 SA6 Ultras but only having 100 production models completed when they launched, this kind of half-assery bothers the hell out of me.
Or am I just crazy and unreasonable?
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But that’s like folks talking about £500k + cars they probably have 10+ of them…as for burn in I like the ride from the get go tbh ie 90% mental and the rest… let the drivers flex 
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I can’t take 99% of the discussions in that thread seriously, and that’s a big part of why I post here and only ever lurk Head-fi. Don’t get me wrong, people can do whatever they want with their money and involvement in the hobby but I can’t go more than 3 posts at a time without rolling my eyes at the assertions made. And that’s coming from someone who laid down the money for the Storm (which is by FAR the largest single purchase I have ever made for a hobby).
@Ohmboy I am absolutely in the same boat regarding “burn-in” of anything; I expect that it shipped to me as it was supposed to be, and taking the time to get to know gear is like half of the fun IMO! I can’t fathom running something on noise instead of just enjoying your music for whatever period of time you’re “supposed to” burn them in, what a waste of time that could be spent enjoying them or quickly moving on if they don’t impress!
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“Burn in”…I think sometimes even with IEM’s this can make sense…heres what our @WaveTheory says regarding certain sets which I can get behind 
…
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I kinda would like to have a Detailed, Rail Road Track type of explanation how a planar-magnetic driver gets “burn in”.
I do actually get the pad wear… ear driver distance changes a bit and this is something i tested with factory new HD6XX vs. used HD6XX. 2 months production difference, same factory.
You get the same sound characters by little pressing the new headphones inwards = ear driver distance gets the same. But they still sounded very very very similar. Would say, the same.
Now back again to the very very little planar-magnet… what moves or changes while using it so that the sound changes or gets better?
I would bet money… nothing.
I still think the term is just f–ked up. Burn in.
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And that’s cool
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Uh oh! My name has been invoked on a controversial issue.
For clarity, I use the term “burn-in” for what goes on in the brain, and I use “break-in” for what physically happens with a driver. Both happen. The one with the larger impact is less clear and varies with each piece of gear, as best I can tell. It’s also really hard to pin down brain effects because while all human brains physiologically have the same mechanistic operation (we are all of the same species, after all), our experiences cause nearly limitless differences in how those physiological mechanics manifest.
Right…
Some amount of break-in is unavoidable. Moving parts are going to be stiff, particularly when they’re new, and will require some flexing before they settle out into what their “normal” or “target” behavior is going to be. The field of material science has known this for decades, maybe even centuries. I don’t know why audiophiles like to forget this.
Does it make an audible impact? Sometimes! The case of the DCA Expanse is a good one. It’s actually quite measurable even in the frequency domain. My friend Lachlan at Passion for Sound (check out his channel, it’s very good) measured an Expanse brand new out of the box, and then after break-in:
That image shows up around the 27 minute mark of his interview with Dan Clark.
At first blush, that may appear to be a tiny difference. If you isolate any 1 frequency, more often than not, it is a tiny difference. But our ears do not isolate 1 tiny frequency when we listen to music. You have to look at the relationship between fundamental frequencies and their integer-multiple overtones called harmonics. Our ears are going to pick up on the patterns that all of those create together. In the graph, look at the difference at around 250 Hz; it’s about 1dB. Alone, that might be barely audible for a small percentage of even highly experienced audio professionals. But, now look at the first 2 integer multiples: 500Hz and 750Hz. There’s about a half dB difference at both of those places, all with the broken in being higher than the brand new. Any string pluck or vocal note that has a fundamental frequency close to 250Hz is going to sound about 2dB more forward on the broken-in unit than when it was new. A 2dB difference is now getting into a range most humans can detect.
So, yeah, break-in happens. Here’s an example.
What this little diatribe does not answer is “should we tolerate this?” That’s for you to decide with your wallet.
Cheers 
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I think my rant got misunderstood: I wasn’t going off on “does burn/break-in exist?” That wasn’t what was relevant to me.
My issue was coming from the idea that a company believes their IEM drivers work better after break-in. I remember one Dunu IEM recently (I don’t remember if it was Talos, SA6 Ultra or something else) that the Dunu rep said Dunu encourages and suggests a 50-100 hour break-in for that IEM.
The issue I’m raising is as such: if a company feels break-in is important for the “ideal or as-intended” operation of their IEM, then why aren’t they breaking the drivers in, in a manner of their own control and then shipping to customers so the IEM arrives in a “ready to use properly at open-box” status?
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I do…but am divided on the cause, be it adaptation of the brain to the new sound signature or whether it is due to some actual physical wear-in of the driver or other components, but yes…I do.
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NO. Not when I am paying 4 thousand dollars for what is supposed to be a flagship set. That shit better be flagship right out of the box or it’s going back. That is just laziness. I will not pay for a manufacturer’s lack of attention to detail.
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I read your post earlier today…It took me a little bit of time but I found the thread I was looking for over on headfi. Zach from ZMF touched on this topic when a few of the members asked him about it…If you want the link to the thread shoot me a pm…I am just copy and pasting this it deals with burn in from the company:
We have one, but logistically it doesn’t make sense, as I’d assume people would rather wait less time for their headphones and have them sooner.
I used to burn in the headphones for about 10 - 20 hours each headphone, but the problem is the process isn’t really done until about 100 hours, so that effort was basically doing nothing. If we burned them in that long it would really hamstring production and shipping, and logistics.
My suggestion would just be for new owners to let the headphone play for a full week, and listen in between. Even for new owners of stock models, that leaves plenty of time to decide before the return period is over.
Burn in isn’t about the frequency response changing, it’s about the mechanical parts of the driver flexing so that the parts are used to moving and have less resistance mechanically, and testing reliability. If the drivers actually changing in a differing amount to each other, than the tolerances of manufacturing are not good, and it means the tensioning and or tolerance of the drivers differ too much from each other because of the way they were produced. In that case it’s more about reliability than acoustics.
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you forgot the /s…
I can appreciate the overall point of the statement and position. But I take issue with one part:
I don’t think it’s fair for a major company (I’m not putting this on an Elysian or FatFreq sized company per se. Though I’m not absolving them completely either) to try to have their cake and eat it too. They want customers to do their QC for them to test for reliability issues, but cry about production, shipping, and logistics issues, and say it’s about not making customers wait too long for the IEM.
Really, now…what?
This is what I mean. If the company thinks it’s important to do 100 hours of break-in to check for QC issues and making sure the drivers work as intended, why are you sending them out until you are assured they will pass mustard?
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This may be an unpopular opinion or not the answer you are looking for but I am ok with it for the most part…I can see where the smaller companies want to get a batch produced, qc’ed and then shipped together to cut down on costs…During that 100 hours I am going to be listening to them and getting accustomed to them anyway…I personally would rather have them than have to wait for them…One other option is just don’t buy those companies products if you don’t agree with their business model…Just my 2cents and we all know what opinions are like
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Roger that! To be clear I was not responding specifically to you, hence I didn’t do a direct reply. My comments are directed at the portion of the audiophile community that is very anti-break-in. This segment of our community tends to tout themselves as being the “science-based” side while at the same time ignoring huge swaths of well-established material science, the science of conductivity, and the cognitive theory of pattern recognition. I thought I would try to speak to some of those in the above.
A very fair question. The best answer I can give is that because all of this is ultimately science-based, the outcome of the break-in process is also predictable. Matching a pair of drivers at the start and then knowing how they will break-in over time increases the amount of confidence in letting them out the door.
I mean, yeah? It’s a fair take. I certainly can’t fault anyone for holding that view. As a reviewer I’ve been loaned some BNIB headphones that needed break-in. I have a limited time with most pieces. Driving them for 100 hours before I can meaningfully listen chews up close to a calendar week of time.
Common quote: “Breaking in headphones is cost-prohibitive for small companies.” - is also true. Doing so at the factory or HQ requires space, something to power every set, power, and time. That’s all additional cost that gets past on to the buyer if they do it in house.
None of this answers the question generally for if break-in should happen in-factory or in-home. IMO there is no given answer to that. But, I understand the reasoning on both sides, truly. To each their own.
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