100% perception .
Burn in vs perception
Posting here in speakers, but could probably go in any of the forums. Question of the night: how much of burn in of components is actually burn in of our perception? That is, is burn in partly us becoming accustomed to a change in sound.
I’m listening to my SF Amati Traditions that at first I found a bit strident, but I now find lush, dynamic, and generally brilliant. I bought them as 1-year old demos so theoretically they should have been played enough to be broken in. I haven’t changed anything in my system—I have been working on my room with more stuff, but that’s it.
Sometimes reviewers or arm chair audiophiles (me) will state that said component needs to be plugged in and left alone for weeks until it gels with the system. Could this simply be our own perception burn in OR is something real happening here?
For speakers I can buy it (woofers need to loosen up and all), but I almost always buy used, and I almost alway a) find a difference of a new component (good or bad), and b) in time, I couldn’t tell you what the change was. Maybe just me, but our brains are pretty good level setters.
I willing to bet this can be a large part of “burn in”.
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"Hi, guys....my name is Jerry and I am a....*non-pg pause*.... *sigh*....a thin-skinned pansy..." *snickering in the crowd, someone laughs..* "...*softly*...byte me...no, don't....f'n vampwire...*snort*...." Physically, yes. I bruise if you look at me hard....between the blood thinners, diuretics, heart meds, Symbicort, and the self-indulgent stuff that allows me to be 1) Vertical I refuse to 'age gracefully'...deal. ;) Speakers are mechanical: Full Stop. Anything that exhibits motion of some form can have a form of 'break-in' Tubes, ttables, carts, even a CD...moves. The amount varies, so the 'break-in'/'warm-up' cycle(s) ought to be considered subject to Something.... Butt, mine or yours...since we exhibit the most 'motion'....within the space, away from a space (esp. your listening one...or however many...), and are subject to 'adjustments' more than anything else in your chain of audio extravagance..or not.. The biggest warm-up/cool-down is our perceptions and expectations of what we expect to hear immediately (if not sooner) falls to that same olde wetware we haul about. Case in point; personal: If I'm away from my 'pyle' for awhile, it takes me a day or so to re-adjust, recalibrate, remember (*huh?*L*)....basically reboot self. If absent long enough, all has gotten shut down. ...whatever that was. YRMV....and likely do, to your whatever it was... ;) MHO, but enjoy self, anyway, J
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I won't argue as I am but a simple idiot. I will say this though. If anyone really wants an answer to this. I found it amazingly simple. Build yourself a headphone amp. Say something simple like a Bottlehead Crack. If you don't notice a huge night and day type difference from hour 1 and hour 20. I don't know what to say. I will never say I have a great ear. I can hear but also have some hearing issues. After that experience I no longer argue. In my experience I can't deny, it is real. Cheers. J.F. |
Interesting insights. I’d agree that there is a difference between extended warm-up and burn in. I find my tube pre (c2300) is improves after half hr or so and my DAC (Weiss) settles in after an hr. Burn in I have only experienced with speakers and tubes. I do feel the 300 hr burn in recommendations for cables and such seems dubious—can we really tell the difference after weeks of listening? If I’m a/b testing, subtle changes can be difficult to perceive after five minutes. How much of changes we hear with time have to do with our own moods, ambient noise, etc. |
+1 I decided to be nice today. So as I read these various threads, I just kept quiet. But then I read your post and I nodded approval. So technically, I just fell off the wagon. Therefore: What is it with these people clacking away on their keyboards spewing nonsense. Of course gear has burn in and cables have burn in as well. Why all this, "well if I can't hear it then it doesn't exist." Where did all of these Luddites come from? Scratch that. Where did all these theoretical physicists and PhD's in Electrical Engineering come from? The new power cords for my amps took two weeks to settle in. The first 8 hours they sounded good. Then they got so bad between 8 and 30 hours I could not even listen to the stereo. I turned the volume down and walked away. After that it might sound good one day and bad the next with the variation diminishing over the second week. Suddenly one day the system sounded amazing. But for a week or so I was starting to think my purchase was a mistake. My HT system is mid-fi. I have some decent Monitor Audio Gold speakers and a Marantz receiver- killer OLED monitor. I bought some speaker cables for a few hundred dollars- didn't hear a big change. Bought some good AQ HDMI cables in the $100 range. Saw a little improvement, maybe in the picture but not in the sound. The big changes came when 1) I moved my Furman Power Conditioner to my HT system. That made a big improvement in the picture but I didn't notice much difference in sound. and 2) ran an ethernet cable to my Apple TV box from my expensive audio grade network switch. Again a large improvement in the picture. The sound is good. Typically, I wouldn't expect a mid fi system to have the resolution to reveal anything but the largest of changes. For some reason I demand near perfection in my 2 channel but with HT I'm more concerned about the picture. As long as the explosions shake the room and the dialog is clear, I'm good. Maybe it is from growing up with a 19" B&W TV. |
It seems we all have different experiences concerning break in. I have 7 pair of bookshelf speakers and most seemed to change sound over time. I have a Loki Max EQ and I would need to control brightness for a time. After the so call burn in, I would no longer need the EQ, I have 4 integrated amps. Hegal Mac hybrid, Accuphase and Pass. Out of the 4 the Pass definitely went through some type of break in. When I first plugged it up, the bass was very strong and it sounded very dark. After about 200 hrs or so, it became very sweet and natural sounding. |
@erik_squires Can I ask what class D amps you had this experience with? I have a pair of PS Audio M1200 amps still in the boxes they came in (bought used). Not sure when I’ll put them in service, they’re more intended as backups right now, but I guess I may need to leave them powered up 24/7 if/when they do go in to service. |
Back when I was about 17, and had no stereo, I mounted a couple car speakers in 2 cube cardboard boxes, used some lamp cord as speaker wire and hooked them it up to a tape deck. Sounded like crap. But after a couple weeks, it was sounding pretty sweet. Now you tell me, was it the burn-in of the lamp cord or my ears adjusting to the sound? Pretty sure what I learned back then holds true today. Equipment makers tell us to wait for a few hundreds hours for a very good reason. Sure there are items like speakers that will improve with age, but for the most part I’m sure we become accustomed to what we are hearing. |
In the 30+ years I have been trying equipment, speakers, and cables, and outside of allowing 24 hours for warm up of circuits and several days for mechanical run-in of brand new speaker drivers, I have never heard sonic changes related to "burn-in" that I deemed significant enough to make me reassess my original opinion about how something sounded in my system. In every case I can remember, I either immediately liked or didn't like the way something sounded, and time did not substantially change my original assessment. I have had a couple of occasions where I wanted to like something because of reviews, popularity, or appearance, and tried to convince myself I liked it, but ultimately I have pretty much found my initial assessment to remain unchanged, as long as I was being honest with myself. All of this stuff I read about equipment or cables needing days, weeks, or months of burn-in to sound good just seems like audiophile hoodoo to me. |
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Oh, almost forgot. This one has happened to me and a few other poeple. Using ICEpower amplifiers (Class D) I came back after being gone for a weekend. I had turned off the rack (fear of surges). When I first got back I could not understand why my system sounded so bad. I finally realized, 2 days later, it was that I had turned the amps off. For some reason those Class D amps, and maybe others, really don't sound very good until you leave them on for 2 days. They don't have to play anything, you don't have to listen to break in your ears. Just leave them on and they will sound better. My Luxman however has no such issues. |
I don't want to make a lot out of burn-in, but I'll tell you my story. When I started getting into speaker mods I upgraded the tweeter and midrange caps in a pair of Focal speakers. For about 2 days I was having weird surround effects. Sounds would appear to come from under and to the right of my chair. They stopped with nothing in my room changing at all. Based on that, I feel there was definitely something going on related to head related transfer function math. That is, there was some odd comb filtering going on that caused me to perceive the sounds in the wrong place which eventually went away. It also tells me that if we are measuring for these effects, the standard cap measurements in the basic AC tutorial won't be adequate. |
There’s some great perspective from very experienced members which I echo. I personally believe a lot of the ’burn-in’ comments from manufacturers are a way to temper buyers and bridge the time period while the listener themselves adjusts to the sound characteristics of whatever component it might be.
I too am in the camp that many solid state components take time to sound their best, specifically warming up from cold and stabilizing. Speakers are the main items I've audibly heard break-in and sound changes. |
I believe capacitors can require burn in time. A recent example is the PS Audio M700 and M1200 amps. Paul at PSA did one of his videos on a question regarding break in on electronics and one of them according to him sounds terrible off the assembly line. They give it a minimum of 48 hours burn in time to prevent large numbers of returns due to it’s initial sound. The other amp does not. (Can’t recall which was which). He put it down to probably the caps which really is the only thing that makes sense to me, though he admitted he wasn’t 100% sure of that. Prior to that I was pretty sure SS did NOT require break in time, but he convinced me otherwise. I never doubted mechanical items do, speakers and carts being the primary examples. |
My opinion is that burn-in is greatly exaggerated in audio. Tubes clearly burn in--they are red hot glowing metal. Wires do not change much if at al. Here is an unrelated fact. Suggesting the need for hundreds of hours of burn-in has avoided many, many returns. By the time 300 hours of listening time is up, the listener has gotten used to it. jerry |
I guess it has to be somewhat person and experience related. But for me 100% burn-in. I have been an audiophile for fifty years. I am sure I wondered for the first few years as I developed my listening skills. I have broken in dozens of components now and I have very good listening skills… no imagination or adjustment involved. I know exactly what I want and how the current sound differers from it, and if there is a small change.
For instance, over the last five or six years I broke in three identical copies of an Audio Research Reference 160s. It was hard not to hear the complex behavior of the change in sound on the first (typically they take 600 hours to break in). To my surprise the second went through exactly the same complex behavior. I couldn’t believe it… but the third did as well. Exactly the same sequence over the same timeframes. I also noticed a very small continuing improvement out to 1,000 hour befor no further change. |
I find this thread to be reassuring. I've always felt a little inadequate because I couldn't discern any difference in electronics after they burn in other than the difference that warming up makes. I definitely can hear burn in with phono cartridges and speakers but not with amps, pre amps, DACs, etc. Perhaps there really isn't a difference to hear. |
I think BURN IN is the biggest hoax and misunderstanding there is in the Audiophile community! The statements people making about anything needing burn in makes no sense at all. The sound of the equipment is not changing but peoples own hearing and perceptions to the new equipment sounds are. It's simply a matter of your ears making the adjustments.
Modern electronics, especially high-end equipment has very tight tolerances on the resistors and capacitors and components, and their values simply don't change enough over a short period of time to impact the sound. I've even seen people talking about fuse and cable burn in! Please explain exactly what is being burned in? |
Drivers with a physical suspension benefit from movement and time played when they’re new. After several hours of flexing, they tend to achieve something closer to their rated specs, and therefore the intended response. Similarly, stylus suspensions benefit from some early flexing as well. Crossovers can also benefit from burn in...specifically caps, but that aspect tends to be more subtle, and there's less provable physics theory involved. Because it’s subtle, what can be heard will vary, but most of the highend speaker designers I’ve been around definitely prefer to give a new pair some burn in time. |
@w123ale you’re working on your room and now the sound of the 1 year old demo speakers is more to your liking. By working on your room I assume you mean acoustic treatments, repositioning of speakers and some furniture, etc…things that can impact the sound, correct? So what’s that got to do with break in? |
Speakers do break in. Every one I've had, did. You can even speed things up with a CD break in disc that plays brown, pink and white noise in and out of phase along with frequency sweeps. It does the trick. I always use a selection of CDs that I'm intimately familiar with and will go back to them over the course of time to ascertain changes for the better, and they do get better. All the best, |
I would say, in the case of your speakers you are absolutely right. You have accommodated to their sound. In other cases electromechanical “ break in” does occur. I actually measured it with a set of tubes. I think this is true of cartridges and ESLs for sure. However there are many items that do not break in including cables and most solid state electronics. Any suggestion that they do is psychological. People will swear they hear a difference and they do but that difference is at the other end of the chain. The sound of my system changes with my mood. I’ve learned not to make changes when I’m in a bad mood. Another issue is that more accurate sound can initially sound worse until you have a chance to listen to a multitude of program sources. I’m comparing two different step up transformers now. After initial measurements I installed the most efficient pair. I’ll listen to them for a month or so before switching over to the other pair.
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