Quote:
... I have burned the headphones in for several hundred hours, and even though I'd planned on returning them to Audez'e several weeks ago, I waited until my Liquid Fire arrived just in case inadequate amping was involved. None of these factors has changed the fact that my LCD-3 just doesn’t sound right...
If you only have 200-300 hrs of burn-in, you did not fully burn them in. I say that not to be critical of you but to be helpful based on my experiences with this headphone. I had several of the issues being discussed here with my LCD3 but I continued to burn my pair in for a full month 24/7. After a month of burn-in, the issues disintegrated. When my 3's had 2 weeks of full burn-in, they still did not sound right to my ears. It was sometime between the 3rd and 4th week of burn-in that I finally liked what I was hearing using the same CD tracks as a reference. If you have say 300 hrs on them and you listen to them on a daily basis and conclude that after several days of additional burn-in that they are not changing so the burn-in must be complete, you would be right and wrong at the same time. How is that so? (1) You would right that it had not changed much or even at all and (2) you would be wrong that the headphones have stopped changing from burn-in because it takes a lot of time (more than a few days) to make a small change in sound and this is especially true after the initial changes in the first few days of burn-in.
I'm sure some people will post snide remarks about burn-in and the psychological effects of the brain becoming accustomed to the sound and those posts will be respectfully ignored. I'm just trying to be helpful to those that are experiencing issues with their LCD3. I can accept that the LCD3 may not be for everyone and it is also possible that their are some QC issues, but until you have tried burning them in 24/7 for a month, then IMO you haven't heard them at their best. I think Audeze and its dealers should extend the trial period to something like 6 weeks (especially considering the cost of this headphone) so that we can fully burn-in the 3's and then judge them for what they are. If Audeze and its dealers were to do something like this, I think it would take the pressure off of us to make a premature decision and to their benefit perhaps less returns.
As a side note, being the engineering specialist that I am, I wonder what analysis is being done by Audeze on their customer returned headphones. If it were me running the show at Audeze, I would take a known good pair of LCD3s to use as my reference and call it my "A" sample and call the customer returned samples B1, B2, B3 etc. I would do subjective listening tests (using specific reference tracks of music and perhaps a listening panel of golden ears within the company and make sure that they take notes of what they hear) and also I would take FR & waterfall plot measurements of both "A" and "B" for comparison. I would use the listening tests mainly to confirm that I can hear what my customers are complaining about. I would then try to focus on the differences in the objective measurements. I would then burn-in the B samples in intervals of 100 hrs up to 700 hrs (or longer) and at each 100 hr interval, perform the same listening tests and measurements as I did pre-burn-in. If at any of the 100 hr intervals, the B samples improve to the point that they sound the same and measure the same as the reference "A" sample then I would repeat the process on more B samples to make sure the improvements are repeatable. If repeatable, I would then change the owners manual to reflect the amount of burn-in required and I might change the trial period to reflect the number of hours needed to hear them at their best.
If at the end of the 700 hrs of burn-in, the listening panel concludes that no improvement took place and the objective test measurements confirm this, I would start a comparison tear down of the "A" and "B" samples to determine the root cause of the differences. Perhaps the root cause is dimensional differences or physical characteristics such as driver stiffness, or there could be differences caused by variations in the assembly process. It also could be a combination of things. Once the differences between A and B are determined, I would see about tightening up the tolerances of those characteristics that are different. I might run a Design of Experiments (DOE) using Six Sigma methods to determine the key characteristics and levels needed to output a good headphone based an output of FR and waterfall measurements. I doubt whether anything like this is being done by Audeze or any of their competitors but considering that this is a $2000 headphone and the widespread response to it, I don't think it's out of the question.
