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Does Equipment Break In, or Does Our Hearing Adjust?

I’ve read many comments about how the sound quality of equipment improves after so many hours of use.  I don’t doubt what people are saying.

About a year ago, my wife and I were tired of not being able to hear dialog while watching TV.  Especially when there was background music or noise, we had a hard time hearing dialog.  Turning up the sound helped, but not very much.  The sound of the TV sounded normal to other people visiting us.

We bought a Zvox sound bar.  Setting it up, we could hear the dialog, but it sounded very tinny, almost irritating.  But that disadvantage was outweighed by being able to watch TV and hear what was being said.

Now, a year later, we can still hear the dialog, BUT, it doesn’t sound tinny anymore.  The voices sound normal, like people we talk to in real life.  It’s not irritating in the slightest.  This happened gradually over a year, so we didn’t notice it until we thought back to what it first sounded like.

My impression is that our hearing adjusted or became used to the new tinny sound.    Or, maybe the sound bar broke in to sound normal. But if it broke in to sound more like normal, I would have thought that it would lose the special effects that enabled us to hear it better.

Or even, maybe it was a bit of both?  Any thoughts?

128x128tcotruvo
ghdprentice
6,969 posts
 

While it does not sound like your experience necessarily has anything to do with breakin. With high end equipment breakin is very real and completely reproducible.

johnah5
235 posts
 

I wonder how one would know?  I went and heard my old Klipsh Heresy's that I sold to a friend and it was an odd sound but after an hour I started to sound better. The speakers have been played long enough to pass any break in but for sure my ears needed to adjust so that is a real thing!

JH

carlsbad's avatar
carlsbad
1,551 posts
 

Some equipment clearly "burns in".  Tubes are the best example.  They are metal glowing red hot so it makes sense they need time to reach equilibrium.  Electronics are very small circuit paths in semiconductors and so I can see them rearranging some atoms along the way.  But the time needed to burn it is greatly exaggerated.

It is very convenient for a manufacturer when a customer calls up and says "I don't like the sound, I want to return" and the manufacturere can respond "How long have you listened.  This ___________needs 300-400 hours to burn in."  So the customer hangs up, keeps listening, gets used to it, and figures out 400 hours will take 6 months and after 6 months it is much less likely he will return...oops, lost the box if nothing else.

And I'm skeptical about many things burning in--copper wires for one.  speaker wires, interconnects, and power cords.  The atomic structure of copper doesn't change with low level signals running through it.  Some of these same manufacturers try to tell us they have found directional copper. 

 OTOH, sometimes "burn in" can include the consumption of some alcoholic beverages and on that 10th night of listening with just the right blood alcohol level, this _____________ is now starting to really burn in and sound great.

Jerry

teo_audio
2,197 posts
 

 

 

Does Equipment Break In, or Does Our Hearing Adjust?

Yes.

Both, yes.

No simple clarity for the linear minded who project the idea of being safe via the filter of the animal mind's demands, I'm afraid.

Like Jung said, "“Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge.”

Which is how we ended up with 'negative proofers' getting involved in science and polluting it with powerful mental demands for certainty. Where certainty does not exist in things that have unknowns and things not yet well understood.

The argument is not about logic, it's about mental design/function and projections. It's not about science, it's about how some minds project science to be, via fiat of desire, via projection of unthinking force. That problem child (literally!) is the animal in the human, making safety and surety demands.

Sorry, science does not work that way.

But engineering does!... as engineering was designed from the ground up to deal with this mass problem of the bulk of how humans filter/color through/via their minds.

So when you find someone demanding that it's all junk and people are just hearing things and break in and so on is not real, it's an 'animal level anti-science human animal wants to be safe' projection.

One has to wrestle that projection to the ground, openly, and in enough completeness... that it begins to actually shut up and let the rest of us get on with explorations in science.

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
1,896 posts
 

Both, yes. Though for my part, I’ll say I’ve previously underestimated the effect of phycological / hearing adjustment. Over the years now I’ve had two of the same item (one old, one new) several times, which sometimes shows perceived "large" burn-in changes as illusory. Of course this is greatly complicated by the fact that some manufacturers DON’T produce the exact same quality item from unit to unit - even when they’re supposed to be the same version. And then there are products where the maker silently works in minor changes over time (no explicit version change). And then some products - like headphone pads - really do change their acoustics from wear & conditioning.

So I’ll just be satisfied with the fact that BOTH apply, but that actual large changes from burn-in are exceedingly rare.

I once had a guy install new output caps in a custom tube headphone amp. When I listened, it sounded like complete sh*t with no bass and most of the midrange missing. He said: `don’t worry, these caps just take a long time to break in! Get a few hundred hours on them.` Well I got fed up with that quickly, because it was truly unlistenable. So I cracked the amp open and see that he’d put the 0.47uF "bypass" cap in SERIES with the main cap. So even with 300 ohm headphones the high-pass rolloff effect was starting at something like 1 kHz. That’s my best example of "burn in mythos run wild".

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