Burn in vs perception

I don't want to make a lot out of burn-in, but I'll tell you my story.  When I started getting into speaker mods I upgraded the tweeter and midrange caps in a pair of Focal speakers.  For about 2 days I was having weird surround effects.  Sounds would appear to come from under and to the right of my chair.

They stopped with nothing in my room changing at all.

Based on that, I feel there was definitely something going on related to head related transfer function math.  That is, there was some odd comb filtering going on that caused me to perceive the sounds in the wrong place which eventually went away.

It also tells me that if we are measuring for these effects, the standard cap measurements in the basic AC tutorial won't be adequate.

Oh, almost forgot.  This one has happened to me and a few other poeple.  Using ICEpower amplifiers (Class D) I came back after being gone for a weekend.  I had turned off the rack (fear of surges).  When I first got back I could not understand why my system sounded so bad.

I finally realized, 2 days later, it was that I had turned the amps off.  For some reason those Class D amps, and maybe others, really don't sound very good until you leave them on for 2 days.  They don't have to play anything, you don't have to listen to break in your ears. Just leave them on and they will sound better.

My Luxman however has no such issues. 

If you can't hear burn in as it occurs, whether it be speakers or electronic gear, stop where you're at as you've achieved ultimate audio nirvana and can't/won't benefit from any upgrading from here on out.

Find a new hobby. 😄

All the best,
Nonoise

In the 30+ years I have been trying equipment, speakers, and cables, and outside of allowing 24 hours for warm up of circuits and several days for mechanical run-in of brand new speaker drivers, I have never heard sonic changes related to "burn-in" that I deemed significant enough to make me reassess my original opinion about how something sounded in my system.  In every case I can remember, I either immediately liked or didn't like the way something sounded, and time did not substantially change my original assessment.

I have had a couple of occasions where I wanted to like something because of reviews, popularity, or appearance, and tried to convince myself I liked it, but ultimately I have pretty much found my initial assessment to remain unchanged, as long as I was being honest with myself.

All of this stuff I read about equipment or cables needing days, weeks, or months of burn-in to sound good just seems like audiophile hoodoo to me.

What a bunch of thin skinned pansies.