[aminus]

can you explain that ? How and why as the reference you have is based on this brain burn in thing ?

Let’s take an IEM with a really weird tonal balance. How about the tia Fourte? Don’t crucify me, alright?

Well, the Fourte’s tuning has lots and lots of peaks and dips and odd holes and plateaus here and there, and often in spots that are critical in an IEM’s sound signature. For example, the pinna compensation: the Fourte has a massive dip right before it that undoubtedly changes how one perceives the sound signature of the Fourte.

Now, if one were to brain burn in the Fourte, this no longer becomes a flaw of it. You just stop realizing that there ever was a flaw, and this makes you unreliable, because the Fourte’s sound signature is inherently colored and a little wonky. This applies doubly so to less extreme examples: you are unable to describe a thin IEM as thin because thin is now the norm for you. You are unable to call an IEM bright because you condition yourself towards a given IEM’s brightness. So on and so forth. It makes one psychologically iron out the characteristics of a transducer, be they good or not, when ideally a reviewer should be able to recognize what they are hearing and be able to articulate it.

 

[Wyville]

I feel like you're adding far too much pretense to this role of what's essentially an audio journalist. A review functions as one's way to talk about what they think of an IEM. I don't think there needs to be any treatment of the function like it's some sort of sacred mantle and special power. Anyone could choose to write reviews if they wanted to. The quality of said reviews is another matter entirely.

That's where we clearly differ in opinion. It has nothing to do with an ivory tower, but simply that I personally feel I have a responsibility as to the quality of the information I share and that requires me to put in the work. I have that as an academic and bring that with me in my reviews (be it a bit less strict to keep it fun). It's fine if you disagree, I am not looking to convince you, I just want to share some thoughts that I hope might make some minor contribution to the hobby.

Regarding brain burn in, isn't that quite literally the definition of Stockholm syndrome? I find the idea that one has to get used to a sound signature to evaluate it a bit silly - it defeats the purpose of attempting to judge tonal accuracy or tonal balance. It essentially amounts to, consciously or unconsciously, forcing yourself to like an IEM. And I don't agree with that at all. The idea that the user has to bend to the product rather than the other way around is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with admitting that you don't like a sound signature. And trying to explain this away with the "reviewer's duty" shtick just reeks of being afraid to openly admit one's own opinions in fear of offending others. An almost twisted attempt at objectivity that ends up becoming more misleading and misinforming than anything else. You don't know if the reader or potential buyer will or won't take an issue to a tonal phenomena on an IEM, so why pretend that you are in any position to handwave or excuse it?

I don't know, maybe it's just me, but every time I entertain this idea it never fails to feel like desperate straw-grasping attempts at forcing oneself to like something they don't. I don't agree with this idea of an IEM magically having the right synergy with the right mood on the right day. To me, there is a set of things that an IEM can or cannot do. I don't know about other people, but I can usually have a pretty good idea of how an IEM handles these things in a short period of time. I know whether or not an IEM has good dynamics with a single test track. I know if an IEM can do bass slam just by having it play something with adequate kick drum impact. It's not hard for me to judge if an IEM can do transients quickly or slowly, or if it has a good tonality or good timbre, etc. etc. I probably sound like I'm tooting on my own horn at this point, but I'm trying to get at something: I don't think it's hard to judge an IEM for what it is without needing days and days of exposure to "acclimate" to it. If anything, the "acclimation" clouds one's own personal preferences of things. But hey, that's just my take on it.

Note: The usage of “you” here is not towards Wyville specifically, but to whomever it may concern. Sorry if it comes off as a personal attack

As @thesheik137 pointed out, brain burn-in has to do with biology and there is a very real period of physiological adjustment. Just like your eyes need to adjust to the light, so too do your ears need to adjust to sound. Which is the actual sound? Your unadjusted ears? Or how it sounds after a few days of listening? If you walk into a room from a bright sunny day outside, is the room really dark? Maybe the room is dark relative to the outside, as you see with your unadjusted eyes, but walk into the hallway without windows and suddenly the room feels bright. These are things I choose to work with because I understand them (background in physiology). So there is the sound on its own, which I feel you can only judge by adjusting - and adjusting has nothing whatsoever to do with liking something or not, so your Stockholm Syndrome analogy does not apply, it is a physiological adjustment after all - AND you can compliment that with comparisons where the differences relative to each other can be highlighted. Adjust to one, then switch to the other and see what your unadjusted ears tell you. Then do it vice versa, adjust to the other and listen to the first.

That incorporates the physiological element into the reviewing process, the purpose of which is to provide the most complete picture of an IEM. It has nothing to do with catering to a specific opinion because that would be putting the cart before the horse. You do this without any preconceived idea and let the IEMs speak for themselves. Run them past your music library, add music you never listen to just to see. Those are all bits of information that tell you something about those IEMs, their strengths and their weaknesses. And if in the end you don't like them, then at least you have a comprehensive set of reasons for concluding that.

 

[Layman1]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ecious-metal-quicktake-k5n00l9z?sref=kPIaWmpY

Demand for the Leonidas II has led to significant supply shortages in the palladium market

Haha, there's been a few articles on Bloomberg (I subscribe and read it daily!) about Palladium, and I always do think of certain cables when I read them

 

[mvvRAZ]

That's where we clearly differ in opinion. It has nothing to do with an ivory tower, but simply that I personally feel I have a responsibility as to the quality of the information I share and that requires me to put in the work. I have that as an academic and bring that with me in my reviews (be it a bit less strict to keep it fun). It's fine if you disagree, I am not looking to convince you, I just want to share some thoughts that I hope might make some minor contribution to the hobby.

As @thesheik137 pointed out, brain burn-in has to do with biology and there is a very real period of physiological adjustment. Just like your eyes need to adjust to the light, so too do your ears need to adjust to sound. Which is the actual sound? Your unadjusted ears? Or how it sounds after a few days of listening? If you walk into a room from a bright sunny day outside, is the room really dark? Maybe the room is dark relative to the outside, as you see with your unadjusted eyes, but walk into the hallway without windows and suddenly the room feels bright. These are things I choose to work with because I understand them (background in physiology). So there is the sound on its own, which I feel you can only judge by adjusting - and adjusting has nothing whatsoever to do with liking something or not, so your Stockholm Syndrome analogy does not apply, it is a physiological adjustment after all - AND you can compliment that with comparisons where the differences relative to each other can be highlighted. Adjust to one, then switch to the other and see what your unadjusted ears tell you. Then do it vice versa, adjust to the other and listen to the first.

That incorporates the physiological element into the reviewing process, the purpose of which is to provide the most complete picture of an IEM. It has nothing to do with catering to a specific opinion because that would be putting the cart before the horse. You do this without any preconceived idea and let the IEMs speak for themselves. Run them past your music library, add music you never listen to just to see. Those are all bits of information that tell you something about those IEMs, their strengths and their weaknesses. And if in the end you don't like them, then at least you have a comprehensive set of reasons for concluding that.

I think a better analogy would be evaluating a house you're visiting vs one you've just moved into vs one you've lived in for a while

When visiting as a potential buyer you're quite critical and you can evaluate all of its shortcomings and whether or not they are a dealbreaker for you
When you've purchased it and moved in, it's still the same house as the one you visited, but because it is yours, you are more inclined to like it and overlook what's wrong with it
Once you've lived there long enough you've adjusted it to your preferences, done some remodelling (changed cables, DAPs whatever), and now it isn't really the same house as the one you were looking at a few months ago

 

[Rockwell75]

In my experience, when listening to gear there is a process that starts with an initial impression (those 10 or 30 minutes consumers use) followed by period of acclimatisation (some might call it 'brain burn in') followed by a period where the listener can form a more informed opinion. This takes several days with me and I have had a few times where after acclimatisation, I slowly started to form a different opinion because I was using a wider range of music or things simply started to fall into place. That can go in any direction. The DITA Fealty for instance took me several days before the signature suddenly started to make sense and I absolutely loved it. The U12t I was very impressed by initially, but after a few weeks I found them missing the emotion I like in my music. Getting to know gear takes time and that is not yet taking into account physiology and psychology, which both affect the impression you get. Reducing the influence of those factors can only be done by listening over a longer period of time. So the length of time is functional. It does not have to be extremely long, but if you were to look at an opinion over time, you see the strongest fluctuations early on and it stabilises after a while (after which there can still be change, but likely in a much more gradual way).

This is 100% true. Often we're wowed out of the box by an IEM only to find after a few days/weeks that things we overlooked at first become tremendous annoyances, or conversely the true strengths only become apparent after time. While I appreciate the snapshot impressions some reviewers provide based on superficial demos (< 1 hour) that capture some of the salient features of a product-- especially given that I myself do not have access to very many to demo-- at the end of the day what is more important to me is the overall gestalt of a product, and this, more often than not in my experience, takes more time and perception to discern.

 

[MrLocoLuciano]

Let’s take an IEM with a really weird tonal balance. How about the tia Fourte? Don’t crucify me, alright?

Well, the Fourte’s tuning has lots and lots of peaks and dips and odd holes and plateaus here and there, and often in spots that are critical in an IEM’s sound signature. For example, the pinna compensation: the Fourte has a massive dip right before it that undoubtedly changes how one perceives the sound signature of the Fourte.

Now, if one were to brain burn in the Fourte, this no longer becomes a flaw of it. You just stop realizing that there ever was a flaw, and this makes you unreliable, because the Fourte’s sound signature is inherently colored and a little wonky. This applies doubly so to less extreme examples: you are unable to describe a thin IEM as thin because thin is now the norm for you. You are unable to call an IEM bright because you condition yourself towards a given IEM’s brightness. So on and so forth. It makes one psychologically iron out the characteristics of a transducer, be they good or not, when ideally a reviewer should be able to recognize what they are hearing and be able to articulate it.

don't agree with that...
When you describe an IEM when listening to it you describe it with your reference (brain burn in is playing a role there).
So not taking it into account when describing the sound of something new is a bit unfair, like not running all the same race.
I think like @Wyville said that in addition to the first impressions, you also need to get used to it in order to make a proper statement...

 

[mvvRAZ]

don't agree with that...
When you describe an IEM when listening to it you describe it with your reference (brain burn in is playing a role there).
So not taking it into account when describing the sound of something new is a bit unfair, like not running all the same race.
I think like @Wyville said that in addition to the first impressions, you also need to get used to it in order to make a proper statement...

Unless all your impressions are done before you’ve adjusted?

 

[aminus]

As @thesheik137 pointed out, brain burn-in has to do with biology and there is a very real period of physiological adjustment. Just like your eyes need to adjust to the light, so too do your ears need to adjust to sound. Which is the actual sound? Your unadjusted ears? Or how it sounds after a few days of listening? If you walk into a room from a bright sunny day outside, is the room really dark? Maybe the room is dark relative to the outside, as you see with your unadjusted eyes, but walk into the hallway without windows and suddenly the room feels bright. These are things I choose to work with because I understand them (background in physiology). So there is the sound on its own, which I feel you can only judge by adjusting - and adjusting has nothing whatsoever to do with liking something or not, so your Stockholm Syndrome analogy does not apply, it is a physiological adjustment after all - AND you can compliment that with comparisons where the differences relative to each other can be highlighted. Adjust to one, then switch to the other and see what your unadjusted ears tell you. Then do it vice versa, adjust to the other and listen to the first.

That incorporates the physiological element into the reviewing process, the purpose of which is to provide the most complete picture of an IEM. It has nothing to do with catering to a specific opinion because that would be putting the cart before the horse. You do this without any preconceived idea and let the IEMs speak for themselves. Run them past your music library, add music you never listen to just to see. Those are all bits of information that tell you something about those IEMs, their strengths and their weaknesses. And if in the end you don't like them, then at least you have a comprehensive set of reasons for concluding that.

He didn't say brain burn in was biological, he said it was psychoacoustic. Keyword psycho, from psychology. Brain burn in is psychological. You are attempting to equate it to one's iris' expanding and contracting, which is blatantly incorrect. There is no such physiological mechanism in the human eardrum. What there is, is what one psychologically conditions themselves to perceive as normal, and how that conditioning causes oneself to perceive other things. I don't understand why you'd choose to use such a blatantly false equivalency, given your background in physiology. There is nothing physical about Pavlov's experiments playing themselves out in human audio perception.

As mentioned earlier, I find this methodology clunky at best and a waste of effort at worst. Using tracks I have never heard before is a sin in and of itself in my eyes - I find it impossible to judge an IEM's capabilities if I do not know what the track does on my reference gear, or any other gear I've used for that matter. Being able to do so would be borderline prescient - after all, who's to say that the track sounds compressed because of the mastering and not because of the IEM?

don't agree with that...
When you describe an IEM when listening to it you describe it with your reference (brain burn in is playing a role there).
So not taking it into account when describing the sound of something new is a bit unfair, like not running all the same race.
I think like @Wyville said that in addition to the first impressions, you also need to get used to it in order to make a proper statement...

Absolutely, when I listen to an IEM it is comparative to what I perceive as neutral, which is highly influenced by what my daily drivers and reference gear are. I don't see how it's unfair - I specifically choose my reference gear based on what I perceive as neutrality in other less finicky transducers (see: speakers and headphones), and then from there I use them as an extrapolated benchmark for tonal accuracy. If an IEM sounds unnatural compared to my neutral-proxy, chances are it's tuned unnaturally. And that's just for tonal balance - things like mental conditioning don't apply as much to things like tactility or dynamics or detail retrieval, especially the latter 2 where it's a game of more = better. If a transducer doesn't sound detailed, no amount of mental conditioning is going to make it detailed. It just isn't.

 

[MrLocoLuciano]

Unless all your impressions are done before you’ve adjusted?

And you don't own or listen to anything apart from test?

 

[mvvRAZ]

And you don't own or listen to anything apart from test?

Sure I do, but both my ranking and my reviews are based on the first, or first few hours of listening - that way, all comparisons and tiers I give are based on consistent criteria

As to specific comparison within reviews, those are once again based on my initial impressions as opposed to what I’ve managed to make the IEM into

Going back to my house analogy, how would it make sense to evaluate it based on months that you’ve spent living there and all the remodeling you’ve done?

 

[Wyville]

I think a better analogy would be evaluating a house you're visiting vs one you've just moved into vs one you've lived in for a while

When visiting as a potential buyer you're quite critical and you can evaluate all of its shortcomings and whether or not they are a dealbreaker for you
When you've purchased it and moved in, it's still the same house as the one you visited, but because it is yours, you are more inclined to like it and overlook what's wrong with it
Once you've lived there long enough you've adjusted it to your preferences, done some remodelling (changed cables, DAPs whatever), and now it isn't really the same house as the one you were looking at a few months ago

No, I don't agree with that analogy at all. Are you saying that you are unable to evaluate an IEM if you listen to it for a longer period of time? Why? Can you only spot flaws during the initial phase of hearing new IEMs, and that once that period is over you can not pick them out as easily? That strikes me as very odd! It is almost like you are afraid of letting the IEMs speak for themselves. Like you are forcing yourself to form an opinion in a certain way. That strikes me as introducing a huge margin for error and I would never conduct any sort of evaluation like that (scientific or hobby).

He didn't say brain burn in was biological, he said it was psychoacoustic. Keyword psycho, from psychology. Brain burn in is psychological. You are attempting to equate it to one's iris' expanding and contracting, which is blatantly incorrect. There is no such physiological mechanism in the human eardrum. What there is, is what one psychologically conditions themselves to perceive as normal, and how that conditioning causes oneself to perceive other things. I don't understand why you'd choose to use such a blatantly false equivalency, given your background in physiology. There is nothing physical about Pavlov's experiments playing themselves out in human audio perception.

As mentioned earlier, I find this methodology clunky at best and a waste of effort at worst. Using tracks I have never heard before is a sin in and of itself in my eyes - I find it impossible to judge an IEM's capabilities if I do not know what the track does on my reference gear, or any other gear I've used for that matter. Being able to do so would be borderline prescient - after all, who's to say that the track sounds compressed because of the mastering and not because of the IEM?

He didn't say, but I did. Are you a biologist? Because I am, specialised in adaptation physiology and so I know a thing or two about a neurophysiological response.

 

[aminus]

He didn't say, but I did. Are you a biologist? Because I am, specialised in adaptation physiology and so I know a thing or two about a neurophysiological response.

This appeal to authority is baffling. You tried to equate a physical, quantifiable reaction to light to a subjective, unquantifiable mental state. Specialization in science or not, I think the false equivalency is pretty clear. Unless, of course, you have a peer reviewed paper quantifying the state of change in neurophysiology regarding audio and conditioned responses.

Gee, this sure is swerving off topic, isn't it?

 

[Wyville]

This appeal to authority is baffling. You tried to equate a physical, quantifiable reaction to light to a subjective, unquantifiable mental state. Specialization in science or not, I think the false equivalency is pretty clear. Unless, of course, you have a peer reviewed paper quantifying the state of change in neurophysiology regarding audio and conditioned responses.

Gee, this sure is swerving off topic, isn't it?

It has nothing to do with an appeal to authority.

 

[aminus]

It has nothing to do with an appeal to authority.

It sure seems like one to me. In any case, I patiently await that peer reviewed paper, or perhaps a response as to how exactly you evaluate a transducer using tracks you're unfamiliar with.

 

[MrLocoLuciano]

Sure I do, but both my ranking and my reviews are based on the first, or first few hours of listening - that way, all comparisons and tiers I give are based on consistent criteria

As to specific comparison within reviews, those are once again based on my initial impressions as opposed to what I’ve managed to make the IEM into

Going back to my house analogy, how would it make sense to evaluate it based on months that you’ve spent living there and all the remodeling you’ve done?

You are saying that when earing a new IEM, you compare it to the remindings of the old test, or the "souvenir" of the first listen of the gear you own?
If you do like that it's a complete nonsense if I might give my opinion. Direct comparaison is already difficult enough so comparaison by memories...