Do driver in headphone degrade when age? - Page 2

^I think there is a huge difference between a pair of shoes and IEMs  There is no comparason.  

Edited by Sinue - 7/9/11 at 5:53pm

Brain-in.

Shoes?

Yes , I have worn out several pairs. My favorite pair twice, actually. A pair of black Florsheim wingtips I bought 20 years ago. I take them in to be resoled and they're good as new.

Headphone drivers are rather different.

Also, I should point out that Twinkies and McDonald's hamburgers don't age, either.

lol, my two favorite entrees...

I never understood how headphone "burn-in" only improved sound, never degrades it. Mes' think burn-in is a load of Hewie. Does the driver deteriorate over time? Probably, but I guess its so little and so slow you'll never know it.

Actually, sometimes it does make it worse, it depends on opinion.  When I normally get a pair of headphones, the bass is normally the first thing to neutralize.  In some headphones, I would rather had the bass like it was out of the box (has more impact).  In some other cases, I've had a pair of headphones get much worse overtime (became boring), but then somehow get better.  It all depends on the pair of headphones and the driver setup and tweaking done to it.

Now you should define how "boring" sounds and how "fun" sounds.

Otherwise it's all, scientifically speaking, balderdash.

 

Testimonials are quite useless here. That's why I keep the frequency response of my IEMs flat - to detect any mythical "burn-in".

So far I haven't been successful.

 

I was thinking of the guys who buy phones and then plug them into 50 hours of white noise to burn them in. I've never read where one came back and said "boy these things aren't as good as they were 50 hours ago".

 

I've never really noticed any improvement in bass through burn-in in my headphones. If anything, I notice a difference in how I perceive trebles when I put on a pair of headphones after a while of not using them.

Most people just accept the change.  Most reviews also don't say if the headphones got better or worse with burn in, they just say there was no more change in sound.  Most of the time the change is good as the headphones sound less stiff and more smoothed out (not the right words, I know).  Other times, there are drastic changes that fluctuate.  For example, the DUNU DN-16 (Hephaes) I have had a weird burn in.  I liked them out of the box, hated them during burn-in (50-75 hours), let them burn in more (150+ hours now) and absolutely love them.  It's weird, but differences can be heard.  Some will like it, others won't.  It's just that the stiffness that sounds bad (vs smooth).
 

Bass always comes first, and if you listen to the headphones the whole time, you won't notice it as much.  If you just burn them in after an initial listen, then you'll hear it.  Treble is the biggest one since they take the longest to sort out.  From what I've heard burning in 20 pairs of headphones... :p

 

Edited by tinyman392 - 7/10/11 at 12:04pm

Exactly!  That's my experience after trying dozens of IEMs.  When I was a noob, I was like burn-in?  Now, I'm quite sure, it's my perception has changes, adjusting for the new environment.  Just like your vision adjust to the darkness over time.
 

 

Boring and fun change from person to person (but it doesn't make it nonsense in the scientific world, you just have to further explain your definition if asked).  My definition of boring is lifeless (lacking of life; not no life).  And to get that type of signature, you entirely diminish the highs.  Also note that the fact that it was boring wasn't the point I was trying to make.  The point I was trying to make was that there was change, it it got worse (this is opinionated, but out there). 

 

My iPod is also on flat, and I've been successful detecting burn in multiple times (20+).  Again, I'll let you decide on this one.  It is possible to not detect burn in in really slow changing headphones, since the change is so small, you don't hear it.  However, small changes over a long time will indeed cause change.  Lots of people have been successful, lots haven't.  Which is why we're at a stand-still. 

 

Several people with measurement equipment (namely Tyll from InnerFidelity) have shown that burn-in exists but only to a very fine degree. That's beside the question though. Assuming burn-in does exist, is the rate of change constant, increasing or decreasing over time? In the first two cases, one could project that a headphone could go through so much burn-in that it acquires undesirable characteristics. In the third case, the burn-in process would end at some point, and the drivers would reach a final state which no longer changes. In this case, the only way to actually damage the driver would be to subject it either to current that is beyond its designed limits, or to physically damage it.

If they did measurements in dB, then a small change in dB is extremely large.  Starting from zero, every ten decibels you gain is 10^x the energy (the SI measurement for loudness).  For example:

 

10 dB = 10^1 more energy

20dB = 10^2 = 100x more energy

30dB = 10^3 = 1000x more energy

40dB = 10^4 = 10000x more energy

<continue however far you want to go>

 

So lets say they measured a before and after and a certain frequency went from 80dB to 60dB...  This is also 10^8 - 10^6 or 80dB - 60dB.  So you'd have an energy change of about 99000000, which is a lot of energy.  Now lets say that it went from 20dB to 0dB.  This is also 10^2 - 10^0 = 100-1 = 99 energy change.  They are both 20dB drops, but one is a heck lot more energy than the other.

 

I do want to see if their data shows that a driver can actually fail due to overuse (normal use), it would show up in their data for sure :)

The problem with "burn in" is that if a product genuinely changes, it opens up a lot of liability for the manufacturer.

If a headphone has a one-year warranty, then someone could claim that the product is defective because it changed and make a warranty claim.

Management, legal and accounting would be all over engineering if products were actually changing with use. Further, products are tested for thousands of hours before they go on the market. Management reviews the tests. If a major change occurred, they'd make engineering fix it.

Even if they found that X number of hours were necessary for a particular design, they'd burn them in at the factory, just to make sure it didn't change further and potentially incur warranty costs.

Burn in is magical thinking. People love to think they're doing something special that makes their experience unique.

If you really want to do something that changes your listening experience and learn more, go get a soldering iron and build a CMoy. You'll actually learn something instead of performing an audiophile folk ritual. After the CMoy, apply what you learn to building amps, DACs, or any number of cool projects. Those will improve your listening experience. A ceremony won't.