Breaking In New Speakers...


Greetings everyone,
I have a spankin brand new pair of Totem Arros (along with center, surrounds and sub) on their way.

Suggestions on how to break these in? What is the current wisdom? What do most Audiogon folks do?

Thanks in advance.
headshrinker2
Put them face to face, a few inches apart. Wire one out of phase. If you have a test/break in CD, put it on repeat for a few days. Volume should be a little loud, but not enough to get you evicted. 100 hours or so will do the trick. This will drive small animals insane...
Use'em. Just don't expect much for the first couple of weeks. Don't sit in the listening chair expecting to hear something wonderful right away. Unless you are dealing with a deadline regarding a return option, just relax.

The biggest change will happen over the first 24 hours of play even though they will typically smooth out even more as time goes on. There are some easy methods for breaking in pairs (out of phase, placed face to face, and covered with a heavy blanket) but I don't know how you could acomplish something similar with that crew that you've got coming.
It will take a while to get accustomed to the new sound but they should break in relatively quickly - a few minutes of hard driving music will generally do it for the suspension (spiders can be stiff initially) and perhaps a few hours for the cap in the crossover (may or may not be audible depending on quality and design). After a few hours most of the change should be your acclimitazion to the new way your music collection sound (you have to update your sonic memory and this takes the longest time).
Mofimadness's description is the way to go. I just want to add that you also need to feed the speakers with mono signal. The out-of-phase connection will cause bass to cancel each other but not the higher frequency. You can cover both speakers in a heavy blanket to mute that. Now you can break in your new speakers without driving small animals insane.
Buy the disc from Ayre Acoustics called "Irrational but Efficacious".

Track 7 is awesome; be careful with volume the first time. You'll hear why.

I use it monthly on all my speakers.

No affiliaton with Ayre.
Whatever you do, be careful with the volume, be patient as possible and don't overdrive them.
The ayre (track 7) that audiofeil mentioned is for demag not burnin.track (four) is really great for burnin...it get the speaker surrounds moving with lttle volume.Turnon repeat over night.I suggest dont turn up loud for first 50 hours.Maybe more.Found my forests took at least 150 hrs.
Just a note on the "face to face with one wired out of phase" technique...

It's best to set the volume BEFORE you face them into each other.
Once the drivers are cancelling each other out, they won't sound very loud, but may in fact be working quite hard!

The Arro's in particular are relatively easy to overdrive.
While I'm a huge fan of Ayre products, I have not used their IBE CD. I do have the IsoTek System Enhancement CD and swear by it.

There are products that you'd like to try / use but don't know if you'll use it enough to justify the costs - the IsoTek System Enhancement CD is not one of those products. I *used* it to break in my components, and I *use* all the time to "warm up" my system. Highly recommended.