Oh dear, now I have to argue on the opposite side from where I usually sit.
I think burn-in is hideously overrated, but is much less suspicious than recabling, and probably easier to test for. I know, rodbac, that you haven't heard any tests that showed a conclusively identifiable case of burning in, but I've never seen anybody do a real test of this with headphones that disproved it either. People make money off cables, and burning in is only maybe distantly useful for marketing, so who would pay for these tests?
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Originally Posted by rodbac
The point from every reasonable critic's POV that I've read is not that there's nothing that could theoretically change over time, but rather that those changes could not be large enough within the tolerances of a headphone's driver to become audible.
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Why should we assume they couldn't be audible? Is there any evidence for that? Surely, a driver with very thin, flexible surrounds made of a material that changes pliancy a bit when it's been flexed a lot might be a little audibly different, especially when what we're hearing is after all a minutely varied series of vibrations of a tiny surface-- even when it's the difference between a dog barking and a violin, the material difference is tiny, and I think we can all identify that. I'm not saying that these differences always
are audible, just that they potentially could be.
Here's my little anecdote for your collection: a pair of EP-630's that arrived with a bit of bass bloat and slightly piercing highs, which I tested against an old pair of KSC-75's on the same source, creating an EQ setting to make them comparable. After maybe ten hours of use over a few days, the EQ difference got a lot closer. Still psychologically informed, perhaps, but it is a little different from the other anecdotes in that I used a reference at roughly hourly intervals and kept records with EQ settings. Did the headphones completely change their sound? Was it a dramatic, night-and-day difference? No. But it was a little nicer, like they'd broken in a bit.
Why should we refuse the theoretical possibility that this is a material phenomenon when there seems to be at least some reason to accept that it might be one? It's taken to ridiculous extremes here on Head-fi, but now it seems like some people are becoming just as dogmatic against it, with just as many unproven claims, like your "these changes can't possibly be audible" line, rodbac. For shame, to start spouting dogma when you're supposed to be the one talking sense!
ps,
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Originally Posted by rodbac
PS: Something else that works against the reality of "burn in" (at least in my mind) is the fact that not one single phone has EVER gotten worse with break in. I would think if there were indeed these dramatic changes taking place in the driver's materials that at least occasionally they would sound better to someone before those changes took place. Does this not strike anyone else as odd?
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good point in itself, but then again, do shoes, say, get less comfortable as they get broken in? Not entirely a spurious comparison, as it's the standard case of stiff new materials getting flexible with use. But perhaps rodbac's shoes have never had a scientifically provable difference after being broken in. Except for the smell.
