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I'll go against the grain and say I don't believe in burn-in. Don't shoot me ... you can believe what you like, but I'll keep believing what I do until something significant changes my opinion.
If research, with proper blind tests, ever shows a statiscally signficant proporation of listeners can tell the difference between new or "burnt in" earphones I'll happily change my stance but no individual personal testimony will change my opinion.
One thing that intrigues me though is that I've never known anyone mention that their earphones have started to "burn out" ... it appears that "burn in" only goes in one direction.
I'm not going to shoot you, don't worry.
I do however want to make a few statements about your post, the first one deals with the "one individual testimony"... What if 20 people told you that they have heard the effects of burn in, and they all followed the same pattern? How about 30? 40? 50? You've probably heard over 50 people on these forums alone that have stated and plotted out burn in. They all did it on an individual basis, but it's still 50 people. It may not be all at once, but it still is 50+ people. Just keep that one in mind... Now if you go outside these forums... Yeah...
As for the burn out statements. It's true, we don't ever hear about headphones burning out. Why don't they burn out? Well here's the short explanation. First, we have to assume that the following statement is true: "objects with more moving parts will be quicker to break". Although we can't prove this empirically, we can prove this through observations made daily. A HHD will break before an SSD ever will, simply because it has moving parts. Now, lets look at a car, more importantly, it's transmission. A cars transmission has
lots of moving parts. And a cars transmission can take quite a while to burn out. Actually, my '93 Dodge Caravan's transmission lasted almost 18 years before the tranny dropped. Now a headphone is on a much smaller scale with less moving parts. On top of that, we don't push it as much, and it normally isn't used as extensively, or with as much stress, as a transmission will. So if a transmission can last 18 years, the headphones should be able to theoretically last just as long, if not longer.
There is a reason why we don't read about headphone burn out, we are more likely to damage other parts of the headphones, or even replace it before they burn it out.
Electronics wear and change over time, become more or less efficient in the transfer of electricity, but there are still some who disbelieve the existence of burn in. That is the same as someone telling me 1+1 does not equal 2 <3
