abm0
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2016
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Hearing an effect and then measuring it badly is more or less a gift to confirmation bias.
Except I didn't hear and then measure, I just kept measuring and doing short listening sessions at long intervals until I finally liked what I heard. At 115 hours in I was still pretty disappointed and thinking the reviews had way overhyped this model and/or the benefits of burning headphones in, or that I just had a pair that was especially unresponsive to burn-in, that I would have to take the loss and re-sell them etc., but I kept going because the highest number of hours anyone had recommended for these was 400 or so. And 80-ish hours of pure sweeps later... boom! There's a sound I can enjoy long-term. There's that burn-in effect everyone was talking about.
And the coincidence of a better subjective experience, better measured graph, and a new burn-in method for the last leg (I'd never done pure sweeps until then; very short sweeps had been part of some mixed pink noise + sweeps sound that I used for the first 50 hours, but those added up to too little to be comparable to 80 hours of continuous pure sweeps, plus I got more confident/desperate with the volume as well toward the end) simply does not allow me to seriously doubt the effect was real - that the sound changed due to driver burn-in and that the best method to achieve that turned out to be playing 20-20k frequency sweeps at a volume somewhat louder than would be comfortable for long listening sessions.