Conditioning/Burn-In Method

Although I am late to join in, I am shocked no one has mentioned the following burn-in "trick". Reverse the positive/negative connections on one speaker. This puts them out of phase. Bring them together face-to-face inches apart. You can now crank up the volume as loud as you want to & they will cancel each other out & become barely audible. This is safer than replacing them with resistors & also serves to break in your speakers if they are new.

Are you sure? If the speakers were out of phase with each other and faced each other wouldn’t they reinforce each other? One would push when the other pulled, as it were.  If they were in the same phase each would constrain the motion of the other.

Quaint and creative as this notion may be, I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be enough to make a difference. Especially with a pair of Martin Logans.

@bullrider97,

Your outcome does not surprise me too much. Most of the cooker machines' manuals talk in terms of a time window, or range, of days or hrs needed for a given result and it apparently is not a 'the more time spent on the cooker the better' kind of thing. IOW, 11 days was likely waay outside the recommended timeframe...not that any permanent damage results from any of that, it's just that it then takes, as you found, much longer after that even to play plain music through them enough for them to fully recover from the overdose...which is another recommendation that those machine makers offer if you should accidentally do this on your own.

There is a range of 'miscellaneous' types of wires that wire makers recommend that you do Not put on a cooker: many specialty designs like flat ribbon types (i.e. Mapleshade) or those containing active or passive noise reduction techologies, etc. 

I did once have a pair of silver IC's (MAC cables) that tended to require 50 hrs of music break-in if they hadn't seen use in about 2 weeks...!

The biggest factor I discovered with fooling around with wire break-in was the insulation. For other reasons I, for a while, temporarily experimented with two different pairs of IC's that were entirely identical except that on one pair I had removed the insulation entirely just to compare and see what the impact on the sound would be. The sound improved with the bare wires, more open...but, moreover and unexpectedly, the pair without insulation had zero audible break-in time while the other pair would have required I think about a week or so, but I wound up speeding things up on my cooker to about 48 hrs. Furthermore, the cooked IC's ended up with about 90-95% of the openness that the bare ones had maintained consistently from turn on.

Never came across any info that would shed any light on why cookers might affect insulation, but it may possibly go to explain why some specialty wires aren't compatible with cookers...?? Dunno for sure.

Regards,
John

Addendum: for breaking in the speaker drivers and surrounds making speakers out of phase to each other and facing each other would be very <effective> since they would be <physically> exercised the most. But not (rpt not) because they cancel each other out or reduce the volume of sound. They would actually be playing <louder> since the diaphragms’ excursions would be greater when out of phase to each other.