Speaker Break In...? Or listener “Break In”?


Im interested in opinions regarding which has more impact; a speaker changing sound over the first 100-200 hours or a listener becoming more in tune with a certain speakers qualities and characteristics.


128x128b_limo
There’s one in every crowd. We call b_limo an outlier in this case.
Speaker drivers never change over time.  That's why they never need refoaming.
If speaker break-in isn’t real then Pierre of Mapleshade berated the Gallo dude for nothing when he sent new Gallo Reference speakers to CES without breaking them in first like he promised. It was not a pretty sight, newbies. 🤭
I'm not sure which is more important but I attend a lot of live music events and have always found that the music quality as well as even speech intelligibility from sound systems, especially in many reverberant venues, improves in, say, the first 20 minutes of a concert.  I've attributed it to my "learning" the acoustics so that I can process the sound better.  A similar process may well happen with loudspeakers in a reverberant domestic room - after all most domestic listening rooms are quite reverberant unless heavily treated with sound absorption.  In fact, professional acousticians (like me) often refer to them as semi-reverberant rooms.  Most laymen are unaware of just how reverberant their and other's listening rooms are because they are so used to experiencing the reverberation, but it has to have an important effect on sound quality, if in  different ways and degree than that compared to a concert hall or auditorium.