Horrible headphones sound better after prolonged listening?

My thought would be that since You were studying, You were more  focused with that than You were to the music itself which just blended into the back ground. That's My theory anyway, crazy is'nt it! 

I don't know about a medical explanation, but people certainly can acclimate to bad sound. I'm sure it's more psychological than physical, but there may be some physical components. For example, our ears contain a multi-band compressor. But the time constants are much faster than one hour.

 

--Ethan

I guess they could if Your real tired or drunk!

Can you enjoy music listening to cheap radios? There is very very few sound systems that make music totally intolerable to me at least when busy doing other stuff then dissecting music.

 

One of the reason I stick to my Porta Pros for portables and don´t care about amping my Ipod. I would wish it would have better synergy with my ED 8 but the way I use my portables it would be a poor investment making a system that is great for a portable but still can´t touch my home system :p. I love my ED 8 out of my Head One as much as I hate it out of my Ipod.

There is defintely something in the mind that makes us learn to tolerate 'less good' things. For example, we moved from a very quiet edge of town house to one in the middle of a large housing estate. At first we were very disturbed by the noise in the estate. It is noisier than our last house, which has to be regarded as 'less good'. But, now after 2 years, we just do not notice the noise. If anything, were we to move back, it would be too quiet!

 

If we did not learn to tolerate 'less good' we would go mad. That is different from not accepting bad. So if the sound was truely awful, you would do something about it.

It's habituation, plain and simple. Same thing happens here as what happens when you walk into a smelly room.

this happens to me all the time.. i used to have a very high end thunderpants rig, while at the same time owning various cheap under $50 headphones.   every time i went to the cheapies i could hardly stand them.  Then i'd be forced into a situation where i had to use the cheapies for a while and i'd start to say.. hey these sound great.. but as soon as i went back to the thunderpants, or anything else high end.. the cheapies sound aweful again.

 

i also notice that on some days i am much less tolerant of crappy sound than others.  i usually attribute it to my mood.   i go through this with my klipsch s4's, and sennhieser OMX980 all the time.  some days i'm in love, other days  I'm asing myself how i can ever tolerate them.

 

 

Men are creature of habits.

Your brain starts to EQ them after awhile. It's a remarkable piece of hardware.

Have you ever found the blind spots in your eyes? Google around - it's pretty easy to do. IIRC, your blind spot is where the optic nerve connects. You can't see anything there, but your mind fills in the blank.

The same thing happens to me with glasses. Last year, I switched from rimless to a pair of geekier glasses with eyebrows and a rim. For a few weeks, the eyebrows and rims were really noticeable. Now, it's like they don't exist. Same happened with the rimless glasses. They have bolts at the bridge and temples. The bolts were really noticeable for awhile, then my brain tuned them out.

I don't have any hard evidence, but I think the same happens in audio. The features disappearing on my glasses is probably the same as "burn in." After enough hours with a piece of gear, you mentally EQ the thing and put them on with a full set of expectations.

This is also why, I think, people find differences in cables and other tweaks. Once you have an expectation of something you usually find it. People who believe in cables are hearing something different, just like how I cannot see the eyebrows on my glasses. But the eyebrows on the glasses really do exist. I don't try to come up with theories about how they become physically invisible when I put them on. Likewise, cables can sound different to believers. That is, until they don't know what cable they're listening to. Take away the expectation and you take away the sound. That does not mean that there are mysterious, unknowable and unmeasurable forces in the universe. It just means that the difference goes away when you control for perception and expectation.

Prog Rock Man, I had the same experience. I used to live in a boarding house about 30 feet from train tracks. It's a main line, so about 12-15 trains passed each day at all hours. But it was about $200 a month cheaper than other places, in good shape and the landlord was damned cool. The trains bothered me for about a week, then I could sleep through them.

Beware, placebo is quite a different phenomenon from habituation.

This happens when I put on a pair of beats after not listening to good headphones for awhile, I start to enjoy them (god forbid!) and am able to understand how others enjoy them. Then I critically listen to a piece I have heard many times before, and I cringe at the bloated bass and missing details.

 

on another note, silversun pickups sound good no matter how lossy the file is or crappy the headphones are, because most of the song is distortion, so if it adds distortion, it still sounds good (maybe not AS good, but still good). That is what I listen to when I want to DGAF.