From my experience with 2x different ones.
It’s more like: Best experience under the 150 hours… cause they break after/around that time. Not break-in… broken.
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Unfortunately reality is not as cut and dry, there’s just too many aspects to something like this to have a real simple and short answer imo, unless you want to pick an extreme side and become ignorant by ingraining that belief until you view it as absolute simplistic truth, which I will say isn’t really the best way to approach this hobby lol. There are simple solutions though, as in you can care, or not care, both equally easy, a lot more easy than being concerned to find the “truth” of the matter, just do what your own experiences lead you to do. If you find burn in to not matter then don’t worry about it, if you do find it to matter than take it into consideration
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It real doesn’t need to get anymore convoluted than that now does it 
same answer to the “famous” cable debates…it is what it is for you simples.
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Don’t mess it up jajaj. Let’s not overdo it.
I will say that for headphones I haven’t noticed any major changes (have had small changes) with burn in but I have had a few IEM’s that changed massively with anywhere from 3-7 days of burn in (my biggest experience being the OG Shuoer Tape)
Amps and Dacs (besides tubes) I’ve never noticed any difference
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I’ve definitely had headphones change from unboxing to just a little bit later, not 150 hours or anything long like that, usually it’s between the first few minutes, could be pads first breaking in or something tho…
And yeah after hundreds of hours it’s definitely more the pads and clamp changing than anything else.
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Brain burn-in. Otherwise, I am a burn-in agnostic.
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So, 20 hours will be the mark?
Same; across many pieces of audio gear, I have never had an experience with one (extended or otherwise) that showed any kind of significant changes over the course of running. Mechanically, yes, things will change over time but never once in my life have I been able to perceive it as anything beyond the scope of placebo.
Those of you who swear by burn-in? That’s your bag and I leave you to it.
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More like a couple hours in my experience, I remember specifically I had some audiotechnicas(dynamic) that with certain specific song I had on top of my playlist just hurt me first try, they had the most massive treble peak, but after a couple hours it came up again and I was just bracing for it and the peak basically wasn’t there anymore…It’s almost like it moved higher in the fr.
Also the he400i 2020 I half swear those guys changed for the worse after burn in, but it could’ve been the pads, I’m talking a couple days of use though.
And then there’s stuff like beyerdynamic and sennheiser headphones that just change massively depending on pad condition.
hmmmm is placeboo also hearing a clear difference between the demo unit that has been burned in for around 100hrs with no one wearing to break in the pads and a freshly bought unit?
Esp with dynamic drivers, bass tends to be quite abit heaver and slugish along with peaky upper mids. Dont have much experence with planars since for most part that isnt my kind of sound.
For the record, yes both brain burn-in and driver break-in are real things that have nonzero impacts on how we perceive audio. Which has the bigger impact is highly contextual.
On the subject of using measurements to verify or disprove driver break-in (or any other audio measurements for that matter), there’s a big elephant in the room that no one really talks about: there is an inherent limitation in using a thing to measure itself. Allow me to explain…
When making a good measurement, if at all possible we want to use a standard that is of a different nature than the thing being measured. If we want to measure a person’s height, we don’t use that person as the unit of meaure, we use feet and inches (if you’re a stubborn American [gulity]) or meters and centimeters. If you used the person themselves, you get a meaningless answer: they are one themselves tall. If you use another human to measure the original person’s height, you get a little bit better idea, but there is still lots of uncertainty in what that means. For example, I might be about 0.83 Shaquille O’Neals tall. But, there is a lot of estimating and approximating in saying that, and it’s still not very clear.
Audio signals are alternating waves of energy travelling as oscillating electric and magnetic fields. To measure such things we have to use the effect that those changing electromagnetic fields have on other electromagnetic fields. So, we use like things to measure each other. Given our current technology, it’s the best we can do, but even what we consider to be very accurate (and useful!) measurements come with some inherent uncertainty as a result. To measure frequency response, we use a changing EM field to set a membrane in motion and create a compression wave. That compression wave then travels to another membrane that vibrates as those compressions hit it, adn then that device turns those vibrations into a wave of changing EM fields, which get measured by another gizmo using EM fields to measure those new EM fields. It’s using the thing to measure the thing, in essence. Sometimes doing so is unavoidable. But, we have to be clear on the limitations of doing so. Our brains and ears are a type of measuring device, if you will, and of a different type that they can be useful for perceiving things that are not captured because we use changing EM fields to measure changing EM fields.
Food for thought. Either way, if you find a headphone/IEM/speaker you love, hold onto it and enjoy the hell out of it, don’t let anyone else tell you you can’t.
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In machining, when you need to take accurate measurements, you use a surface plate (slab of granite), a gauge blocks and then use indicators to measure the difference between the gauge blocks and the work piece.
Could also mount a mirror to the driver and use a michelson interferometer. Is a relatively simple photonics experiment to build an “optical microphone”.
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True! We need accurate measurements in a great many things. Using EM fields to measure EM fields usually works well enough for most day-to-day purposes. I’m just pointing out that there is reason to believe the humain brain is good enough at recognizing patterns that it may detect differences that get missed in the “zone of uncertainty” (for lack of better expression) created by using EM fields to measure EM fields.
Hmm. Seems like that would add mass to the driver. Even a tiny amount can change its vibrating behavior.
You would be surprised how small mirrors that work for interferometry can be made. Where Biologists and Physicist meet, is where things get weird and interesting.
Burn-in. For cables? Meh, I personally have not heard a difference in the sound hours/days/weeks after the cable(s) were installed. I bought a higher end set that actually said they would sound their best after 150 hours of burn-in. I’m sorry, I’m calling bullshit on that. Did they sound good? Hell yeah they did, and that’s why I bought them. But they didn’t sound any better after the 150 hours.
Having said that, The Focal Elegia’s did settle in and improve over time. I have had tubes that got better over time. DACs stabilize and get good over time.
I also think brain burn-in is a real thing. It’s difficult to identify, but I am quite sure it has happened to me. And that’s OK. It’s an unavoidable part of the human condition.
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To add complexity (as if more is needed) to the situation, when I have a new IEM, DAC, Cable, Amp, etc., and press “play” on a musical track, which I have great familiarity with, I have prior expectations of what it “should” sound like. I’m not sure about sound, but in vision, our prior experiences account for a majority of what we “see”. I wouldn’t doubt that sound is the same.
Brain burn-in is, I would say, largely reformatting our prior expectations. This is why new audio equipment sounds, both better and worse, weeks after we bought it and have stopped A/B testing it.
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In my experience “burn-in” is mostly used as a synonym for “justifying my purchase”. I don’t discount it completely in audio, whether it be brain or equipment burn-in, but I am a cynic when it comes to more than say a few to maybe 20 hours.
I remember years ago when I bought the original Auralic Vega DAC. It was the flavour of the month in Audiophile circles for being detailed & resolving - which it was, but I found it fatiguing. The forum crowd told me it needed 250 hours of burn-in, I persevered and no change. Then people started saying that they were finding 500 hours to be more appropriate for a major change. Again I persevered and again no change. Then I started reading where people were quoting 750 & 1000 hours for transformational change!
My crazy person alarm was activated and I advertised the Vega as soon as I read that.
History now shows that the implementation of the ESS Sabre chip in that DAC exhibits a major IMD hump in the frequency response…nothing was ever going to change apart from human perception that was influenced by $$$ outlaid.
OK then, please be clear about it. Because I didn’t find your post clear.
Not sure how your feet an inches example is relevant. Are you suggesting that those measuring headphones are measuring them in units of other headphones??? Standardised unit of measurement exist, and are used in audio measurements. We hardly need to go all the way back to fundamentals here.
“To truly understand headphone cables, we need to consider the big-bang”.
Mmm, ok. So what’s your criticism of our current measurement systems? What deficiency have you identified?