[julian67]

@jimr101

Firstly, if you "don't mean to be rude" then don't say stuff like "you are full of it" or people might question your sincerity

Secondly, what you describe is warm up not burn in. "Burn in" would be a change that occurs after x time of use and is then persistent/permanent regardless of other factors. "Warm up" obviously is a change that occurs as the item warms with use and which is lost when the item is again used from a cold start.

The only sane examination I ever saw of the supposed burn-in phenomenon in headphones was by Tyll at Inner Fidelity and he pretty much demonstrated that the changes observed were related to temperature changes, not permanent changes in physical or electrical properties.

 

[geek707]

Don't mean to be rude but you are full of it. When an electronic welding machine breaks in as the circuits warm up and the connections get better as current flow thru them, I'm sorry the welds and the x rays of them get better. And so does the sound as circuits get better meterials expand and contract. There is a mental factor tru. I tend to be more aware of improvements in equipment I favor rather than the flaws agreed. Yet it still is changes that I am observing.

As someone else mentioned you are describing warm-up, not break-in. An industrial welding machine is built to certain specs ± a certain %. If it does not meet those specs it needs to be adjusted, repaired, or replaced.
Not to mention that except for a very small number of very expensive solid state power amps, nothing in hi-fi could expect to see the kind of energy levels produced by a welder.
What you are describing is classic placebo effect. It's as expected because that's how the human brain works.

 

[castleofargh]

warm up= when turned off all the changes will reverse to the original state
burn-in= definitive changes
warm up must have some matter of effect on sound, but it might be of a degree that is not audible, and there is no telling if the result or increased temperature is better for sound. it will obviously depend on the system itself and what components/power will be used.
I find it hard to make a global answer to such a problem.
I would be tempted to say that if the manufacturers know what they are doing, they made sure the specs would be good under load after hours of use. and if warming up for 10mn was important, I dare to believe that the manufacturer would be aware of it and would tell us about it(if not in the manual, at least in a mail when asked).

 

[jimr101]

I sincerely do not mean any rudeness in saying you are full of it. Just that it is growing up in europe where athletics weren't at the center of education the goal was the truth vs. I'm right and you are wrong. I'm the carter back so I get the prettiest cheerleader. Or I'm the foreman you're under me so tell me I'm right whether or not I am and I'll keep you. I do apoligize for my rudeness. I am rude that's the truth. It not about political correctness like any good frenchman will tell you. It is simply about the simple fact that the more current flows through a circuit it burns in for the better most times and in some cases you get a lemon that for some reason or not does not. This is not a psychological exercise like in the book I'm ok you're ok where one takes the parent role and speaks down to the child. It is simply about getting better sound. I'm OK with me are you OK With your self. I didn't reach a level of making nuclear grade welds by playing pecking orders. My hobby now that I am retired is trying my best to find the ultimate sound not being or having the best sound.

 

[bigshot]

Just that it is growing up in europe where athletics weren't at the center of education the goal was the truth vs. I'm right and you are wrong.

 
So does that mean because you grew up in Europe you think you are wrong and he is right?
 
As for the truth... point to a confirmation through a well conducted double blind listening test, please.

 

[geek707]

I sincerely do not mean any rudeness in saying you are full of it. Just that it is growing up in europe where athletics weren't at the center of education the goal was the truth vs. I'm right and you are wrong. I'm the carter back so I get the prettiest cheerleader. Or I'm the foreman you're under me so tell me I'm right whether or not I am and I'll keep you. I do apoligize for my rudeness. I am rude that's the truth. It not about political correctness like any good frenchman will tell you. It is simply about the simple fact that the more current flows through a circuit it burns in for the better most times and in some cases you get a lemon that for some reason or not does not. This is not a psychological exercise like in the book I'm ok you're ok where one takes the parent role and speaks down to the child. It is simply about getting better sound. I'm OK with me are you OK With your self. I didn't reach a level of making nuclear grade welds by playing pecking orders. My hobby now that I am retired is trying my best to find the ultimate sound not being or having the best sound.

Maybe you should just grow up.

 

[jimr101]

Exactly the oposite, to find the truth one must be capable of being wrong. In there lies the problem I was trying in my dyslexic way and feeble speling to discribe how engineering degrees and technical graphs and data can a
times put us a parent to child aproch to problem solving rather than the humility of having to have failed over and
over again to attain a higher level of judgement. Once one has failed enough and humbled himself enough can he
boldly approch more complex and chalenging task with
the boldness needed to lead. I have never snubbed my
nose at the very acurate and precise mathematics of the
engenering department and they fully respect my years of
practicle experience when I find the short falls of their
blind test figures that inevitably always miss some unpredicted factor. All I'm asking is that one respects my
life long observations on an equal plane as I do respect their technical know how. So for whatever it is worth or not I have observed that just like I had welding machines
right next to another one (just like an objective blind test) one would produce better and better x ray welds the more it was used the other one was a lemon with the same
welding technique. And as I got into the headphones hobby I noticed the very same thing occuring with sound equipment. As we set 600ton roofs on nuclear reactors
somehow the engineers took these observation skills in concideration. The mathematical calculations of the loads were crucial but no less than years of experience
anticipating the unexpected. There lies the problem with double blind test. Fortunatly we are not machines or robots we have senses that when finely tuned have
abilities behond computers and machines to anticipate the not anticipated factors.

 

[geek707]

Given:
You are male
You are old enough to retire
You have been working in a industrial environment long enough to become what I am sure is a master welder.
That means:
You don't have the hearing able to hear what you are claiming you are able to hear.
If what you say is true please point us to the documentation requiring your rigs to be "burned in" before use. 

 

[castleofargh]

I sincerely do not mean any rudeness in saying you are full of it. Just that it is growing up in europe where athletics weren't at the center of education the goal was the truth vs. I'm right and you are wrong. I'm the carter back so I get the prettiest cheerleader. Or I'm the foreman you're under me so tell me I'm right whether or not I am and I'll keep you. I do apoligize for my rudeness. I am rude that's the truth. It not about political correctness like any good frenchman will tell you. It is simply about the simple fact that the more current flows through a circuit it burns in for the better most times and in some cases you get a lemon that for some reason or not does not. This is not a psychological exercise like in the book I'm ok you're ok where one takes the parent role and speaks down to the child. It is simply about getting better sound. I'm OK with me are you OK With your self. I didn't reach a level of making nuclear grade welds by playing pecking orders. My hobby now that I am retired is trying my best to find the ultimate sound not being or having the best sound.

not sure that trying to win an argument by making fun of american education was your brightest move here. and I also tend to disagree with the rest, the powers involved are really not the same. there is nothing to say that a low current, low voltage signal(audio systems) can have any of the effects of whatever is needed for high grade weldings. something with less power could mean slower effect, but could also mean no effect at all or just temporary ones if the structure of the material is not changed.
also I fail to see how getting better weld explains anything about a better signal? maybe more noise in the current is the reason the weld is better for all I know. I'm not denying what you're saying about your job, but you're jumping to conclusions when it concerns audio signals and any possible similarities.

 

[jimr101]

I do not pretend to know anything about audio signal. Only the unbias power of observation acquired over the years. As the son of a WWII vet my love of the US is not a put down of american education put rather an objective study my father made in his theses for his doctorate in education that our athletic oriented education mostly in the 70's could be better served by less compation and more objectivity if we wanted to keep up and hopefully getting better. I don't claim to know why, but I did a little experimenting on my own. I brought a friend of mine to the McIntosh dealer that doesn't own or has any prejudice try on several pair of headphone without him knowing witch were the new one and witch one had a couple hours on them and he picked out 10 out of 10 the used ones as sounding much better. I really doubt that it was his ears were adjusting as they were presented in different order. As old as my ears are I'm pretty sure I could tell the difference between the sound coming out the Iphone and the Mcintosh amp just like I could tell the difference between the new and the older headphones.

 

[TsKen]

So its been 3 years, whats the conclusion?

 

[krismusic]

There is no conclusion. Ever..

 

[Redcarmoose]

What ever the conclusion is, it's personal. Unless of course it's a burn-in recommendation for a specific product made by a company then it's public.

Sony recommends 200 hours per amplifier for the 1Z and 1A. Each of those models has two amplifier sections, one balanced and one single-ended, thus 400 recommended hours total per product.

 

[bigshot]

If you want maximum placebo value, you should burn in your equipment for as long as you can. If there actually is a difference made during burn in, you should return it for a refund, because if the sound shifts right out of the box, odds are it will keep shifting. It's defective.

The difference between expensive equipment and midrange equipment often isn't related to sound quality. It's related to manufacturing tolerances. An expensive model has to perform to a tighter standard. I was told by a high end headphone manufacturer that they were shooting for a +/- 1dB deviation from their target response. They later released a similar model for a lower price. I would bet that it was the same basic design and materials, it would have just had a wider tolerance. So if your headphones shift after burning in, you aren't getting what you paid for.

 

[geek707]

If device X (headphone, cable, amp, etc) requires a burn-in to sound the way they are supposed to, why isn't this done by the manufacture as part of QC? Why am I, the person who put down my cash, doing this? And in the case of the Sony device above 16-17 days? Really? What?
Makes no since at all. If a Sony device for example, is using these special, high tech capacitors that need 8 days of something to sound correct, why is this device shipped without that being done? More to the point why doesn't Sony require their supplier ship them "broken in"?
If a pair of headphones doesn't sound the way they are supposed to out of the box and requires x number of hours of (pink noise, a certain Grateful Dead song, etc) to sound correct, how are they passing QC to begin with? Does the manufacturer even know? And what are you supposed to use to do this? Are you saying playing random cuts of a Grateful Dead cd is the same as using say a noise generator that produces a more even coverage of frequencies and wave forms. (Something Sony or Sennheiser or Grado might have but the average music geek?)
This sounds more like a way to force you to live with a device and adapt to it, than anything else.