Whats the best burn-in for headphones?

[Happy Camper]

Stretching the materials and burning in voice coils on the larger diaphragm models do help with harshness and a little better low end weight. The 701s did "mellow out" after a few hundred hours. New, they were chalkboard annoying with no mid-bass impact. A little tubin finally made them sound decent. Every time you fire up your system, the parameters need to be re-memorized by the materials until optimum but I suspect you will get better performance quicker with a good break/burn in when new.

This ritual is similar to burn in of capacitors, signal cables, power cords, passive and active power filtering etc. The true formulas are held close to the vest by the silverbacks and gear*****s.

I've used an ipod feeding pink noise through my portable amp or fm hash with both my cans when I wasn't using them for the first couple weeks. I'll fire up the hp rig on Friday after work and leave it on for the weekend running foobar randomly. Come Sat. morning both the tube dac/amp and hp are singing their best. By Sunday night, mama better be offering or I'm usually deep into tunes, reading something on the web.

Guess it's time for bed, night boys.

[EYEdROP]

I like to think of speaker burn-in like you would breaking in a new or rebuilt car engine, stretching a rubber band or other any other mechanical device really. Out of the box, things are stiff with tight tollerances and slight imperfections from the factory. The last thing you wanna do to a brand new car is floor it out of the dealership while the engine is still cold and metals are still soft from the factory.

Different headphones take different amounts of burn in. As a general rule, for the first 24 hours I suggest playing background music very faintly with only a notch or two on the volume, just enough to make sound. After that start playing the frequency sweeps at a slightly higher volume than the background music. Again take it nice and easy on the volume, frequency sweeps are stressful. Pink noise is introduced last because it is the most stressful on a speaker. Make sure you check the volume level with normal music because its hard to tell how loud pink noise is. A really good thing to do is put 2 minutes of silence in between every 20 minutes of burn in. You can easily find an MP3 of silence on the internet. Put on which ever burn in track your using , use that silence track and put the player on "repeat". This helps the voice coil cool down.

The whole idea of my burn in method is to slowly introduce dynamic peaks and excursions to the drivers. If you stretch a rubber band to the max when its brand new, it will eventually break pretty soon. But If you slowly stretch it over time, the rubber band will retain its elasticity for much longer and will be able to stretch even further than brand new..

[poppachubby]

I like to think of speaker burn-in like you would breaking in a new or rebuilt car engine, stretching a rubber band or other any other mechanical device really. Out of the box, things are stiff with tight tollerances and slight imperfections from the factory. The last thing you wanna do to a brand new car is floor it out of the dealership while the engine is still cold and metals are still soft from the factory.

Different headphones take different amounts of burn in. As a general rule, for the first 24 hours I suggest playing background music very faintly with only a notch or two on the volume, just enough to make sound. After that start playing the frequency sweeps at a slightly higher volume than the background music. Again take it nice and easy on the volume, frequency sweeps are stressful. Pink noise is introduced last because it is the most stressful on a speaker. Make sure you check the volume level with normal music because its hard to tell how loud pink noise is. A really good thing to do is put 2 minutes of silence in between every 20 minutes of burn in. You can easily find an MP3 of silence on the internet. Put on which ever burn in track your using , use that silence track and put the player on "repeat". This helps the voice coil cool down.

The whole idea of my burn in method is to slowly introduce dynamic peaks and excursions to the drivers. If you stretch a rubber band to the max when its brand new, it will eventually break pretty soon. But If you slowly stretch it over time, the rubber band will retain its elasticity for much longer and will be able to stretch even further than brand new..

Thanks for contributing to what is becoming an interesting and varied thread dROP! I think your process sounds great. I have set a pair of lightly used AKG K240M to the lull of a thunderstorm. Your thoughts on silence interest me, I have a generator that allows me to program silent breaks at whichever interval I choose, for however long. Typically, I do 2 hour stretches with 5 minute breaks. Check out this link and listen to "storm", there are some quiet points in the file. Do you think this will be enough to supplement silence?

BTW EStat if you are reading this I decided to not run the fireworks. I looped the finale which is about 20 seconds but found the frequencies a little heavy in the low dept. "Storm" seems really well balanced.


http://www.burninwave.com/#testsound

[EYEdROP]

It really does take alot to fry a voicecoil, so I dont think the silence is completely necessary. Some suggest no breaks durning burn in. I just like to play it safe in case the volume gets tured up on accident or something.