What's up with "burning in" headphones

D

dj chex

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I was reading reviews on my new hd 280s and i came across a few reviews recomending burning in these headphones by running them for a continous 40 hours. is this a myth or should i consider doing this?:cheers:
 
I've never heard of this... and never had a problem... if u try tell me if it works ok
 
many high end studio and large speaker systems need a burning in period before they're ready to be used or not. this is all up for discussion because it's kind of an esoteric philosophy anyways. we had a genelec rep come in one day to our store and tell us that lots of the studio consultants and engineers will buy their products (or anyone for that matter) and spec them out for the respective studio and they'll burn them in by taking the two speakers, placing them face to face (speakers facing each other) and play white noise through them at a fairly high volume over night. one of the speakers is placed out of phase and if the speakers are made properly and put out equal sounds, they will cancel each other out and be almost silent. wierd huh. he said that this simulates 30 days of use and *breaks in* the drivers and making them sound better. it's a bit hoaky to me, but whatever.


if it will make your cans sound better, who knows. maybe i should crack open a pair of new headphones and try them at the store vs a pair that are brand new that have not been burned in.
 
i guess that makes sense. it's kind of like breaking in a new car. well let's wait and see how these sennheisers sound after a while.
 
make sure if you're doing this, you're using white noise. white noise is the best representation of all the sound spectrum at one time. if you want to do this this is the way to do it. somehow get a loop of white noise or something to break them in. if you have wavelab 4.0 it has white noise generators on it that will just run continuiously.
 
here's what im going to do: i will generate a sine wave at 1kHz using sound foge and play it through my headphones throughout the night. tomorrow when i get off of work i should be able to tell everyone if i can find any changes. i will not be able to do detailed testing but i hope this could be of some help.
 
heh....what timing on our posts

make sure it's white noise. if you burn in 1khz you're only burning in 1khz....not the entire spectrum of sound which is what *needs* it.
 
woah.... this is a new one for me! i'd like to try it out, but all my gear is well broken-in already ;)

-sim*n
 
last night after that post i've recorded a white noise sound from THX's opitmizer test from a dvd. i then repeated that sample w/ my MD player all night and day. I will swear my headphones sound a bit warmer than they did before. I still can be wrong but later i will see if i can compare the headphones against a new pair.
 
I find that weird about what David said that the sounds would almost cancel eachother out.

This is all new, and interesting to me.
I need to buy new stuff so i can try it!:p
 
Last edited by a moderator:
dj /-/2o said:
I find that weird about what David said that the sounds would almost cancel eachother out.

This is all new, and interesting to me.
I need to buy new stuff so i can try it!:p
Click to expand...

it is strange but very true. a good pair of monitors (read: good) playing exactly the same but in the opposite phase, it cancels them out. they almost make no sound whatsoever, even if they're actually playing at high SPL's.

cool, but wierd huh....physics. i didn't write the book, i just read it :)
 
This "phenomenon" really isn't so...it really is true! In fact, some high-end (even ones that are really not outside some of our budgets mind you) speaker manufacturers will recommend a certain number of break-in hours before really judging their sound. It happens in headphones, too, and you definitely can hear it.

The thing is, when speakers and headphones are brand-spankin' new, they are straight from the factory and not settled into their natural operating range. This is very much like a car, indeed. After a little use, the speaker suspensions will get worked in, and the voice-coil will settle in around the spindle (probably tightens up a bit). Most serious headphone reviews I have read mention change in sound, and in particular, the common concensus at Head-Fi seems to be that the Sennheiser HD-280's will start to sound their best around 100 hours of break-in.

I think that headphones, due to their nature, can deliver quite similar experiences (of course the associated equipment will always matter; as always: YMMV ;) :D ) to any user. Speakers, on the other hand, also have a room to deal with. This may alter how you judge the break-in, as the sound at different stages of break-in may sound completely different to another user in another room. But since one person can get the exact same sound from a Sennheiser HD-280 and a iRiver SlimX IMP-350 as another user with the same equipment, different people in those cases, will probably come to the same conclusions about how the headphones sound to them and whether or not they noticed any break-in (YPMV: Your Perception May Vary :p ).

Some say that break-in matters for all equipment. While break-in matters in needles, I'm not sure I care too much about the break-in period of cables, pre-amps, amps, mixers, etc. because I will probably not have the equipment able to resolve those changes in sound, but whatever. I've heard it in headphones, and I'll probably hear it in the monitor speakers I'm bound to get one of these days, but probably not in my Xone:464 that haunts my dreams :cool:
 
my God! you are right!!!!! when both left and right channels on my headphones are positioned exactly against eachother the sound will cancel out! This is just too cool!
 
ok, my head hurts. Are you guys saying that if I point both sides of my headphones together, that they should cancel each other out and I shouldn't hear anything? Is this only with white noise? I just tried this and didn't notice anything. Even with both ear pieces together, I could still hear things. Hmmm, maybe I need some sleep.....
 
One of the channels has to be out of phase so they balance each other out... Physics classes are always the biggest *******. I will get a question about how much a car weighs and how fast it is going, asking me to compute force used, and I will go on a multiple paragraph tyrade about how I can cannot calulate it with the given information because of drag, frictional loss, and the fact that many parts of the car spin, requiring more force to move the object...
-Peasant Nikon
 
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