Break in period

"Does this depend on the type and brand of loudspeaker, material of drivers, power being driven, etc? "

Obviously it does. I'd say anywhere from 100-200 hrs. would generally be enough for most new speakers.

-RW-

Mine only starting to "sing" after 6 months of mostly weekends playing ie: 500 hours+.......
BTW, once broken in, you may want to play with your speakers positioning to suit vs when brand new.

Rather than give a total number of hours, I recommend you play spkrs low volume in the beginning perhaps even using compressed music or music without aggressive transients & dynamics. Increase volume gradually. Also, give yr new spkrs a little time to "warm up" (i.e. the voice coils) before you play loud from cold. All of this shouldn't take more than a total ~30-50hrs altogether.

What I can't understand about break-in is why speakers, CD players and other components -- even cables -- can sound great the day you take them out of the box and THEN start sounding like hell for what seem like interminable amounts of time. The worst, for me, were the Gallo Reference 3s, which became hard, brittle, airless and downright painful after about 6 hours, only coming back to life 150 hours later. I'm going through the same thing, if not to the same degree, with a new Raysonic CD 128 CD player. Sounded terrific Wednesday (this is Friday) and has been getting worse every day since. Dave

I'm guessing the "sounding good out of the box, then sounding bad" has to do with you getting adjusted to the sound. It's new, you want it to sound good, so it does. Then reality hits and you actually listen to the component. Break can't have a "typical" time associated with it. A dealer I used to work with bought a pair of B&W N804's and he swore that the bass got much better after two years.