In think the reviewer didn't a burn-in to the FD7. I can't agree with his staging, imaging and treble discription. Out of the box it sounds in your head, not good 3D presentation and slightly sibilant, but after a good burn-in about 100 hours and more, it sounds very smooth in the upper mids and highs, has awesome three dimensional imaging and a pretty wide and deep outside of your head staging.
For what it's worth, I have a lot of sets with lots of hours on them, and I've never experienced these things changing with time (except in a couple of rare occasions where something broke).
The one thing you're not mentioning -- tonality -- is the only thing I've noticed change with time, but that is very much all down to my perception. I find that if you spend enough time with a particular sound, it will start to sound increasingly normal, and going back to other tunings that previously sounded "normal," the differences will seem exaggerated. This is basically what I'd call brain burn-in. It is not long lasting.
I think the FD7 is a awesome set
Easier than inventing reasons why our opinions are different -- e.g. burn-in -- it's much easier to accept that we have different perspectives. There is no problem with that.
Ya using them for 2 weeks means he might have gotten 5-10 hours at best of actual listening.
I'd estimate they have about 40 hours on them. I often wear IEMs to sleep, which is an easy way to rack up hours. Not that I think burn-in is a factor.
From how he describes the sound I am very certain that is how they sound out of the box. What a bummer.
It's the same process I use for every review. 200 hours burn-in is over a full week of running an earphone without listening to it. That's a lot of time to dedicate a source to doing something that's, in my experience, not useful.
Why can't you accept everyone hears different things?
Bingo.
I don't like reviewers who get some single dd iems, don't burn them in and give them a bad score. People get afraid of buying them, because of this. Sure everyone has a different hearing, but when the iem can't show its full potential, its not good.
I gave FD7 3/5, not a bad score. But I've also just reviewed Moondrop KATO with the same lack of burn-in, and it's also a 1xDD earphone, and I gave that one 5/5. I personally think the $190 KATO is better than the $600 FD7.
Reminds me all the FH5s rushed reviews to gather some likes that buried it not getting the attention it deserves.
You've actually just brought up the one earphone I actually did do a 200-hour burn-in on for the memes, and then reviewed it. And no, it didn't sound different after.
I think whether a reviewer believes in burn in or not, it’s better to at least do it for the sake of avoiding any discussions about it. 100 hrs or so doesn’t do any harm I think.
100 hours of dedicating a source to playing an earphone I'm not listening to is a very tedious tasks, especially when I've reviewed ~50 earphones this year. 100 hours of burn-in for 50 earphones is 208 days.
And again, I've never experienced the effects of burn-in. So that's 208 days for... avoiding controversy on Head-Fi? No offense, but not worth it.
There is not a single manufacturer who haven't instructed me burn the reviewed iem for minimum of 70-100 hours.
Only a couple companies have ever recommended burn-in when sending me units (Fiio is one). I've tried it. It's never made a difference.
Yeah I don't think the difference in opinion is due to not burning in.
Agreed. I expect if someone secretly swapped my set with Ichos', we'd still have the same opinions. Which is fine.
Reviewing is not about what the reviewer likes but about what other people might like.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment. A reviewer can not give you your perspective. They have only their own.
Well I think it’s impossible to be 100% objective as a reviewer. There’s ear anatomy and difference in hearing amongst people. Plus people have different taste when it comes to music genre and what they want out of a sound signature. So with experience you should be able to read also between the lines with regards to a review and the reviewer's hearing and preferences.
Agreed.
Maybe he was listening to the FD5?
There is one hour of video of me handling what is obviously and FD7 and not an FD5.
I work my way around brain trickery. I just don't listen to the review headphone out of box, instead I am doing the ordinary burning process and after it is finished then I start listening. So honestly I don't know if the sound has benefited from the burning or not.
You avoid the placebo effect by... just blindly believing. This is not a great position from which to critique other understandings.
The thing about Super Reviews, from what I can tell, is he thinks a fair amount of aspects in the audiophile hobby are placebo.
Where I write things off as placebo is where I've personally tested my own ability to discern audible differences when I'm blindfolded. 24-bit audio, burn-in, most difference between DACs and amps, balanced cables... A note here for the later critiques of objectivists obsessed with measurements, note that there are significant differences that measurements can show in these areas -- and I don't find they mean much for the listening experience.
I only watch his previews for the unboxing, fit, comfort, ergonomics and the tuning of the headphones and that's it. He literally can't hear the other placebo audiophile stuff.
I will take that as a compliment
Side note: just because the frequency response hasn't changed doesn't mean the sound hasn't changed. The human ear picks up on everything there is to be heard. Measurements only capture information if you know how to look for it.
I generally agree that FR does not capture everything. I've spent a lot of time looking at measurements, though, and FR seems to be the only one that's very useful at predicting something about the sound. But as I often say, it predicts the flavor of the sound, not the quality.
People who are ignorant about burn-in are the same people who do not break-in their new cars and diss mechanical engineering in the same way.
ICE break-in also controversial, but less so than audio burn-in.
truly wonder why measurements for IEMs are done so poorly. A frequency response shows just a tiny part of the whole picture. It's like maybe 20% of what is measured for high end quality headphones. But those are mostly done by companies that have much more money to throw at measurements, like Stereophile, Hifi News, etc.
I agree that frequency response is not the whole story, but I've spent a lot of time looking at other measurements -- I even get a bunch of extra data in REW when I make my own measurements -- and the other data I've seen just does not reliably correlate with listening experiences in any usefully predictive way. At least not with my understanding.
The ideal method to break in an engine is still the dead run in though thats a whole different argument.
Low-key the most controversial assertion in this thread >_<
Then why doesn't FiiO do it themselves before shipping units out to reviewers and customers alike?
For the same reason I don't do it when I get them -- it takes a LOT of time and resources (and doesn't actually matter).
Aside from the controversial topic of burn-in, listening to the FD7 last night and loving the timbre and imaging that I was hearing, I was thinking how do you even measure these most important audio qualities? Well.. definitely not with the IEC711 clone I have.
I am very interested to see measurements evolve to better identify these things. But yeah, I haven't seen it either, and I've heard enough IEMs with nearly identical FRs to suggest that FR isn't everything.
That's not a good argument to bring up graphs to write off burn in completely , nothing is proven here.
While I agree with the sentiment that FR is not the whole story, and that this set of graphs does not "prove" anything. But I think (a) FR measurements are the most informative audio measurements I know, (b) if the structure and flexibility of a driver is indeed changing to the degree burn-in claims seem to suggest that it would probably show up as some variance in frequency response, and so (c) while I would agree it's not conclusive, I think it's useful evidence.
Just because you can't measure it doesn't exist. This is not ASR ***.
And just because ASR can measure it doesn't mean you can hear it
It is entertaining to see objectivists twist themselves into attributing frequency response and harmonic distortion graphs to literally the entirety of the music listening experience, as if spectral decay graphs don't exist either.
I've attached the decay graphs from my before and after measurements of the FD7. While this type of graph looks cool and seems like it should be informative, I've not found them useful for explaining anything in my sound experience. I can say honestly as I'm writing this, I do not know which image -- A or B -- represents my out-of-the-box measurement vs. my 40-hour-burned-in measurement, but I'm interested to see what insights people think they show.
There are a few on this sight that feel objectivity, or at least their version of such, translates into critical thinking or critical analysis. In fact objectivity exercised without critical thinking is merely another form of bias equally and specifically as nefarious as someone who’s subjective analysis is exercised sans critical thinking.
I like your post. I think people definitely overrate the concept of objectivity -- not just the value of it, e.g. holding up objectivity as some aspirational ideal, but also the plausibility of it. An IEC711 measurement has so many assumptions baked it (before you even get to the point of subjective interpretation of the measurements) that to imagine a squiggle on a website as some objective, unbiased truth is pretty philosophically bankrupt. But also, a lot of audiophile stuff really does not stand up to blind testing, and I think it's worth considering that that level of subjective influence is probably not very useful in the sense of offering predictive value.
