Thanks very interesting and very good point ...
@mijostyn , Here’s a video on how to measure driver break-in for your viewing pleasure. Try it/experiment with it/measure it yourself at home with a couple of new drivers.
Are You A Disciplined Audiophile?
The issue of whether break-in is real aside for now, when you make a change in your system, such as a new component or cable, do you have the discipline to wait before making any other changes? I usually mark my calendar for a month and perhaps 2 months and try to change nothing else for that period of time so I can better assess exactly what the new thing is doing. But sometimes it’s difficult to wait. IMO, break in is a real thing, both in the component and the listener, but even if you don’t believe components and cables change after a few days, can you wait at least a month to listen to enough music to adjust your ears to what the new thing brings to the system on its own?
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@deep_333 Thank you for the video and a great example of how you can tilt anything to your perspective. His routine for measuring TS parameters is quite valid except for the driver being held in a very loose manner. It should be locked in place on a non resonant surface not sitting on rubber bumpers. He does show you what happens when you put the driver on a very floppy surface. I clamp the drivers in a bench vise. Here is mistake number 1. He uses two different drivers (of the same type) manufactured at different times with no way of controlling things like poor tolerances of changes in materials. The proper way to run this experiment is to use the same driver, measuring it new and then serially after periods of time. New, after a 1 hour burn in and then a year or two later. Having said that the difference he measures between the drivers is more than one could explain by loose tolerances. Remember what I said. Drivers not not break in, they break down. Subwoofer drivers do not last near as long as other drivers. I keep two spares available as I lose one every two or three years. So, what did he measure, the speaker breaking in or breaking down? Subwoofers will loosen after a short burn in period which is usually done by the manufacturer. After that it is all downhill. By break-in people are usually implying that whatever it is sounds BETTER after a period of time. (Why never worse?) What a particular system sounds like has more to do with the person's mood than the age of their equipment. I just lost a driver last week. It is something like 10 years old. The post mortem revealed a delaminated voice coil. Rock and Roll:-) |
@mijostyn I know all about that....If you recall on my earlier post, I asked you to measure it yourself. His video is just showing the methodology for the type of guys who’ve probably never done it before...no point in nitpicking what he did to try and come out on top on a forum thread. Get a driver, measure it... break the same driver’s living daylights in for a couple of months... measure it again...prove it to yourself. |
One would need to do repeated measurements with multiple same-model drivers, simultaneously, to control for QC / tolerance. Pretty straightforward. No such thing as a more or less “disciplined” audiophile in the way OP mentions, that I can think of, since everyone is a sample size of 1 who’s more or less prone to acclimatization. Amazing what a bit of background knowledge it science and stats can save you from having to just wonder. 😉 |
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