[n-phect]

i believe cable difference, but am up in the air about burn-in
 
i did a lot of a/b'ing of copper vs silver cables and found a difference. Whether the difference is better or not would be preference in my opinion.
 
Burn in , it seemed like there was a big difference, especially with my ultrasone 900s, but i can't actually pinpoint whether it is in my head or remembering a distinct difference.  But they did seem really harsh when i first listened to them, and now they don't seem so harsh...  (put 300-400 hours burn in, they seemed different at 100-110, but not sure if i was just not paying attention enough)

 

[ClieOS]

Quote:

This thread is just my rant to the community.  A last ditch effort to get some people riled up before I start my new job and will not be allowed to post reviews or give advice in regards to other brands.  Stand up for yourselves and don't let yourselves get conned so easily.  Ask questions, give these companies advice and pound them with it until they give you what you want. I know I am not the most popular user around here, it is not like my topics and reviews are well rated and received.  I tried my best to provide the world with accurate and honest reviews of all types.  My status as a reviewer has now come to and end and I plan to help change the world of audio in the near future.  I am a designer by heart and hobby and will be working for a new audio company from now on.  Thank you to those who followed me during my time here, but my time as a reviewer has officially come to an end.  Hopefully, I have helped and inspired more people than I am aware of.  Where would I be without Head-Fi?  
 
Fight the power!  
 
-mike 

Congrat on the new job. I have seen the many positive things a head-fier brought to his new job at an audio company. Look forward to you coming back as a MOT!
 


Quote:

The thing people lack is common sense.  Reading very old Head-Fi threads, you'd get people saying they'd, say, heard a difference between A and B, then later saying "whoops, seems I was wrong".  No drama, no pages of arguments, just the admission and calm acknowledgement from others.  This "It's all true.", "It's all BS" or "A is definitely better than B and everyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot." attitude about things pervading the forum is the problem.

 
Sadly but true.
 
 

 

[swbf2cheater]

Quote:

Congrat on the new job. I have seen the many positive things a head-fier brought to his new job at an audio company. Look forward to you coming back as a MOT!
 
 

 
Thanks!
 

 

[yashu]

 
Quote:

Burn-in is audiophile ceremony, superstition and ritual. Nothing more.

And if you think your ears are golden, then tell us where the channel imbalance is in your amp or source. Components are rarely matched more than +/- 5% in gear. Which means that left and right are improperly matched. Yes, this is very measurable. If your ears cannot hear a measurable difference between channels, how could they possibly hear an unmeasurable difference?

If your ears are "good" enough to hear unmeasurable differences, then you ought to be screaming, yelling and up in arms over the measurable difference between left and right on your amp. That you "believers" aren't is just further evidence of placebo and suggestion.  

 
We are not talking about something as simple as relative amplitude.
 
What changes seems to be within our abled perception. Factors involved in our perception of the various phenomena we would focus on when we listen are extremely complex. They are so complex, the change can be exponentially smaller than the typical tollarances applied to our measurements. It could take something so tiny, and a property far and away more obscure than the simple umbrella measurements currently used, to change something that plays a part in the complex action used for the perception of a very complicated mechanism.
 
Heh... it is not really saying anything that we take such basic measurements! In fact, we barely have the technology for these basic (relatively speaking) measurements. One such example might be using a laser to accurately scan a driver's membrane over time, with a high rate of aquisition: we can do it, but we still can't accurately map each distortion of the individual ripples in an active driver membrane to what specific phenomena humans will perceive... then imagine trying to extrapolate what we might perceive depending on the angle and distance of a driver to our ears, and in what environment... heh, I think we have a little ways to go with our state of R&D. This is just one single example in the myriad of little things that might matter.
 
Can you nay-sayers really claim to have taken a measurement of every possible factor in how we percieve sound? We don't even fully understand how we hear, let alone understand it enough to know how a man made object can be said to be so true as to never deviate in any way over time! Come on gentleman, you cannot be so arrogant to say there is nothing left to be discovered here?
 
Burn in has every possiblity of being 100% true, and it is probably far more probable when you consider all the things that are really involved in something as "simple" as generating a sound wave. Is it more probable that we have perfected sound transmission, or that our man made devices are subject to the infintasimally complex physical world, that our materials science is not yet perfect, and we are only beginning to understand what *can* be measured? Since we do not know to what end, these things, we cannot say with certainty that anything is not happening just yet..?
 
It is far easier to prove something than to disprove it. I doubt we are even close to a competant set of measures, and if so, we are even farther away from being able to say if burn-in is a myth. We have to fully understand every factor involved, which is something we certainly are not able to do in 2011. In other words, It might not be time to be speaking in such absolutes, err... the jury is still out? 
 
 
Quote:

If drivers actually changed, then that would become a warranty issue. Companies go to great lengths to avoid claims. If testing showed a fundamental change after a few hundred hours, legal would freak out and demand heads roll. And heads would roll. Further, they really do test drivers for thousands of hours before product rollout. If a significant change were detected, the engineers would be whipped and sent to fix it.

 
I am not entirely sure we can even say what is truly significant yet. It is easy to have the idea that the brain is extremely powerful, but why do we not carry this simple idea over to the ability of our brain, coupled with the neuro-physical structures involved in our ears, to pick out details relative to others within the most minute pieces of a compression wave?
 
Massively parallel, analog pattern identification and processing. The brain is pretty dang good at this stuff!

 

[caracara08]

Quote:

The thing people lack is common sense.  Reading very old Head-Fi threads, you'd get people saying they'd, say, heard a difference between A and B, then later saying "whoops, seems I was wrong".  No drama, no pages of arguments, just the admission and calm acknowledgement from others.  This "It's all true.", "It's all BS" or "A is definitely better than B and everyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot." attitude about things pervading the forum is the problem.

this might be deleted, but it seems, other than you Curra many of the mods are EXACTLY like this.  

 

[Beagle]

Quote:

Have any of you guys thought, for just a minute, that something such as burn-in may neither universally exist nor universally not, but only happen with some equipment and headphones but not all?

Yes. Someone who only listens at a low volume level may never notice their headphones ever burning in (if they even actually do) because their diaphragms never get past first gear. Just like the old lady who buys a new car and only uses it once a month to go to the grocery store. Her vehicle will eventually "break-in" but really just from aging, not from running flat out.

 

[n-phect]

i think headphone company's most likely believe in burn in , but can't say it cause of legal.

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

i think headphone company's most likely believe in burn in , but can't say it cause of legal.

I'm sure they'd love to believe in it!
 
"My headphones are under warranty and one of the drivers blew."
"It's a part of the burn-in process. We don't cover that."
 

 

[n-phect]

Quote:

I'm sure they'd love to believe in it!
 
"My headphones are under warranty and one of the drivers blew."
"It's a part of the burn-in process. We don't cover that."
 

lol
 

 

[swbf2cheater]

The problem with the burn in religion is that people think it should be relative.  Miniscule changes in voltage and wearing of wires over a period of time cause yet more tiny changes in every area of the headphones in question.  Soundstage shape, size, bass quality, clarity, pretty much anything you can think of has the potential to change slightly. All of them combined make the
sound sound noticeably different than the stock version.  But when you measure any single area of potential change and notice almost nothing if not a very slight difference, you shouldnt toss up the red flag and say Nope! Burn in doesnt exist.  Does this make sense?  I am not trying to come off like a poop face or anything like that haha, I am just ranting my beliefs and concerns.  
 
n-phect is correct, it won't be said for legal reasons, grado gives you a letter with some of their headphones and tells you to burn them in naturally and enjoy the experience to appreciate the potential changes.  If anyone has ever used old speakers for guitars, you might have been told the first thing you need to do is use it for a while before you go on a gig.  Really old speakers from the 60s and early 70s were like this.  So, the theory is sound.  

 

[Sonic Defender]

Quote:

The problem with the burn in religion is that people think it should be relative.  Miniscule changes in voltage and wearing of wires over a period of time cause yet more tiny changes in every area of the headphones in question.  Soundstage shape, size, bass quality, clarity, pretty much anything you can think of has the potential to change slightly. All of them combined make the
sound sound noticeably different than the stock version.  But when you measure any single area of potential change and notice almost nothing if not a very slight difference, you shouldnt toss up the red flag and say Nope! Burn in doesnt exist.  Does this make sense?  I am not trying to come off like a poop face or anything like that haha, I am just ranting my beliefs and concerns.  
 
n-phect is correct, it won't be said for legal reasons, grado gives you a letter with some of their headphones and tells you to burn them in naturally and enjoy the experience to appreciate the potential changes.  If anyone has ever used old speakers for guitars, you might have been told the first thing you need to do is use it for a while before you go on a gig.  Really old speakers from the 60s and early 70s were like this.  So, the theory is sound.  

I am a sceptical fence-sitter when it comes to burn-in. While many burn-in supporters offer what they consider to be strong evidence at the end of the day this evidence is nothing more than ancedotal evidence. I would never say I know for sure that burn-in doesn't exist because I have not myself been able to demonstrate this in a testable, reliable, and valid manner, then have it replicated. In the above quote tiny changes that can affect sound are alluded to, but no evidence is given as to how they actually affect change, and how it is measured and determined that our brain would be able to escalate the detected difference in such a way as to actually make our pleasure centre aware that the experience is different. Although I would never suggest I know you are wrong (how could I after all?) I certainly could not place any credence on the statement either.
 
I purchased a pair of HF2s that were used. After a little getting used to their sound I certainly noticed a difference, but I decided that this was just as easily explainable by considering that I became accustomed to a previously unfamiliar sound signature. Burn-in shouldn't have been a factor as these were used enough from what I heard to have already resulted in some burn-in. Is my experience proof or not of burn-in? How do I know? It may offer some ancedotal evidence that indeed at least some of the burn-in experienced by users could be caused by your brain learning how to enjoy a new sound signature. Perhaps after enough time users simply stop trying to hear their new equipment and just start enjoying the music more and hence hear a difference? Again, I certainly don't know. Maybe burn-in exists, but until it is demonstrated in a controlled, and valid experimental design that is very robust and replicated with large enough samples we just can't know one way or the other. Both sides of the debate have valid reasons for their position and I for one am quite willing to respect and consider both alternatives.
 
 

 

[yashu]

I used to say something to people when they would outright dismiss a phenomena without a matching attempt at understanding the larger issue: Everything Matters
 
I think a lot of what swbf2cheater  brought up in his original post can be attributed to all the things that matter, that people tend to overlook... from comfort to the engineering minuta that fall within previously acceptable tollarances. The "nonsense", then, would be believing that this stuff doesn't matter nearly as much as the other issues we harp on about here.
 
I think I am safe saying that it all matters. We might only be now able to use the lense of our technology/understanding to see how much certain things really DO matter.
 
Everything matters... and we are a long way off from being able to measure everything. It's just my take, but the OP is right that we don't put enough stock in things we do know that matters, nor the things that probably do. Burn-in is far more likely than not likely, but should we really hedge our bets NOW on it not existing? Are the pains from bad ergonimics a myth because a vocal minority claims there isn't anything wrong with fit and finish?

 

[3602]

All this results in one single three-million dollar question:
How much (as in percentage) of this "hi-fi" is sheer unproven (and unprovable) perception?

 

[Sonic Defender]

Probably almost everything would be difficult to substantiate scientifically as what we hear and how well we are able to describe it is so incredibly individual and subjective. No two individuals are likely to hear the same thing in the same way and to describe/evaluate it the same. How could we actually determine if somebody heard what we did? We can identify the areas of the brain that are activated by stimuli, but such areas and response levels differ somewhat in each person. We have no tools that could look at a persons brain activity and say, that activity is completely caused by the music they are hearing and the magnitude of that persons response, and the nature of it is the same as that persons.
 
As much as we know about the brain and perception, it is just a drop in the ocean. That said, there is a huge body of evidence that would seem to support the notion that some audio equipment can produce signals that are widely considered to sound better than other equipment on at least some basic parameters i.e. high end audio systems compared against a $50 system from Walmart. I think it is safe to say that almost no person with normal neurological function and hearing would feel that two such different systems produced equally enjoyable signals. Beyond that, it starts to get very subjective to say the least. Some people love Sens, others feel they are boring and understated, some love Grado, others think the signature bright and crude. That is what makes the pursuit of audio bliss so much fun, the desire to actually find a sound that is universally going to make people smile!

 

[khaos974]

I used to say something to people when they would outright dismiss a phenomena without a matching attempt at understanding the larger issue: Everything Matters
 
I think a lot of what swbf2cheater  brought up in his original post can be attributed to all the things that matter, that people tend to overlook... from comfort to the engineering minuta that fall within previously acceptable tollarances. The "nonsense", then, would be believing that this stuff doesn't matter nearly as much as the other issues we harp on about here.
 
I think I am safe saying that it all matters. We might only be now able to use the lense of our technology/understanding to see how much certain things really DO matter.
 
Everything matters... and we are a long way off from being able to measure everything. It's just my take, but the OP is right that we don't put enough stock in things we do know that matters, nor the things that probably do. Burn-in is far more likely than not likely, but should we really hedge our bets NOW on it not existing? Are the pains from bad ergonimics a myth because a vocal minority claims there isn't anything wrong with fit and finish?

I totally agree, everything matters including brain response to placebo effect and preconceptions, aural adaptation... So don't be so fast to discard psychology as a reason for burn in.