desik
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2010
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Question summary: If we leave a headphone unused for a while - weeks/months, will it sound again like a new out of the box headphone, before the burn-in?
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My experience:
I have a 9-years old HD485 headphone, which I had a hard time to replace with something better. This can definitely deserves some more talk on this forum. Recently I bought a used HD485 from ebay, because my old HD485 is pretty worn out, and getting a whole new one was just a little pricier than getting a new pair of cushions only.
Made a back-and-forth test for sound quality, and the new headphone sounds significantly worse than the old one. Less detail, more boring sound, instruments are mixed up. Yet the cushions look fairly used, used enough to qualify as burn-in. I posted the details here: http://www.head-fi.org/t/532844/headphone-burn-in/90#post_12294731
This experiment has the advantage of having no "brain burn-in" involved - switch from one headphone to the other was done in <1min, repeated back and forth several times.
The main explanation that comes into my mind is that the new HD485 were unused for a long time and reverted to pre burn-in state. Unfortunately I couldn't complete the experiment by letting the new cans burn and repeat the comparison. New cans had a defect - sound coming from just one ear, so I returned them. BTW, testing was done by outputting sound to one ear, on both cans.
P.S. To be honest, I believe the new HD485 sounded even worse than my first HD485 9 years ago. So, there might be other culprits besides un-burn-in. But I'm comparing from memory, so cannot be sure.
==================================
My experience:
I have a 9-years old HD485 headphone, which I had a hard time to replace with something better. This can definitely deserves some more talk on this forum. Recently I bought a used HD485 from ebay, because my old HD485 is pretty worn out, and getting a whole new one was just a little pricier than getting a new pair of cushions only.
Made a back-and-forth test for sound quality, and the new headphone sounds significantly worse than the old one. Less detail, more boring sound, instruments are mixed up. Yet the cushions look fairly used, used enough to qualify as burn-in. I posted the details here: http://www.head-fi.org/t/532844/headphone-burn-in/90#post_12294731
This experiment has the advantage of having no "brain burn-in" involved - switch from one headphone to the other was done in <1min, repeated back and forth several times.
The main explanation that comes into my mind is that the new HD485 were unused for a long time and reverted to pre burn-in state. Unfortunately I couldn't complete the experiment by letting the new cans burn and repeat the comparison. New cans had a defect - sound coming from just one ear, so I returned them. BTW, testing was done by outputting sound to one ear, on both cans.
P.S. To be honest, I believe the new HD485 sounded even worse than my first HD485 9 years ago. So, there might be other culprits besides un-burn-in. But I'm comparing from memory, so cannot be sure.