The audiophiliac conversing with THE speaker god himself is so enlightening That being said, whenever I hear a Brit accent talking about speakers, all I can think of is “These go to eleven.” :)
Disappointed to read comments criticising your crumpled white sheet. Everyone must surely know that it's a £12,000 acoustic sheet whose wrinkles are carefully angled to break up standing waves, absorb unwanted resonances and dissipate reflections. Sheesh, some folks ......
The man the midth the legend ! Andrew jones, 'Speaker break is real'!! I been an audiophile for 33 years and I love the Pioneer FS52 by A.J. so much i bought 2 sets ! 1 set i put up in my attic. A year later a friend of mine goes threw a difficult time so i gave him my used set of FS52s. Then i brought down the FS52s that were in my attic and ohhh my what a difference ! Espically in the midbass and yes the Fs52s sound even better after break in took about 50 plus hours , Andrew Jones over-engrenered the FS52s so people could afford great sound , I got them on a 3k amp right now My Yamaha-AS-1100 and if i was to Rebadged the towers and gloss paint them, nobody would know their 200.00US towers ! I still can't get over how good they sound even the box desighn is outstanding !!! Anything that causes frictions will losen up overtime . Just like a new motor in a car , you need break in time for the the rings on the piston to seat up by rubbing against the cylinder walls !! Yes i'm an engeener also but i work on multi-million dollar machines and robots but my calling was an audio engeener just didn't pay the bills Were i'm from in KY owell my machines build the new mid engine CORVETTE 😆 Thanks Andrew , I would have loved to seen you and Burt Lancatti, Greg Timbers on a passive speaker project dang that would be crazyness ! Thanks Steve , love the channel buddy How was me essay i wrote today ?😆 Why does the FS52 sound so good for the money , Because Andrew got the midrange on point ! And the dip in the high frequency at 16khz allows for non top end fatiguing sound 😆 and provides a smoother top end with soft dome tweeters
Steve, you're amazing and deserve a medal just for putting up with all the crazy critics and punters here in the comments. I don't know how you do it. I suppose growing up in New York, you develop a thick skin or don't survive. : P
No BS just Mr Jones explaining concepts in layman's terms, my first speakers were designed by him and I'm still keep em. Steve that is a golden episode for the content and the high caliber (yet simple) figure you brought in. Awesome video thank you both.
This reminds me of breaking in new guitar strings by stretching them to work harden them. They go out of tune like crazy at first but eventually settle in. The question then becomes, how often do you really need to change your strings?
I've always known speaker breakin is real even before I've been exposed to the idea or concept of it. Purely from personal experience with speakers I had bought over the years and how dramatic their sound had changed over time.
My findings are that transducers require break-in, ribbons amts tweeters in general take less time since less material and they have more cycles per second. I find that full-range drivers require the longest time. I run in most all I make before the owner gets it. Just like the ride on your car changes with time your moving transducer will change with time. Some transducers age like wine others age like a toaster.
Nice to hear the Jones' breakdown. I use his pioneer subwoofers and bought 2 sets of his Pioneer 5.1 system, plus an extra set of the bookshelf. Very nice sounding for medium or small rooms. Based on Steve's original bookshelf recommendation. I like the backdrop of Steve's workspace the best. All I would do is to tidy a small part of it where I video, but it is not that important. He could also hang a wrinkle free grommet grey curtain over a shelf unit from a curtain rod that would give a fine backdrop. But it is interesting to see his workspace and all that he accomplishes within it. In the meantime, as George Orwell said, Keep the Apidistra Flying , my friend.
My experience is that 90% of the improvement occurs in the first 3 hours. It continues to get noticeably better for another 10ish hours, and after that the change is minimal. At about 50 to 75 hours, small details emerge that couldn't be heard at 10 hours, but you have to be listening critically to know.
I don't know if MOST of us are here because we listen critically, I have always thought the opposite, that most of us are here to learn more and to simply get more enjoyment out of our listening. That's not to say we don't listen closely, but I prefer to enjoy my tunes rather than analyzing the process too much.
Not a fan of the sheet.....edit....go green screen and a green turtle neck so all we see is a head. Get a swivel rocker so you can spin your head around. Occasionally Add greeen face makeup so you're just eyes and a mouth.
So it would seem that playing a speaker for an hour at about 75% of its rated wattage RMS, would do the trick. No 50 to 500 hours of "burn in" required. That is a good thing to know. And to know that no, "burn in" is not snake oil, but rather it is real, based on solid mechanical and electrical physics, but overall it isn't something to worry about so much. Most of us will naturally burn in our speakers during use and we'll get them to the state they should be in for the rest of their useful lives, as long as they are not abused. Nice to hear this from an expert who should definitely know.
Andrew Jones said that your speakers have already been broken in; it’s a waste of time to attempt breaking them in further. He said that speaker manufacturers “break in” their speakers before you buy them, generally speaking.
@@bencausey That's not what he said. He wasn't discussing mfr break in of outgoing product. He was referring to a scenario whereby manufacturers would be developing drivers ... in that scenario they'd be working or exercising the drivers to get them to a point whereby their physical characteristics like compliance reaches a point of stasis. At that point they can more reliably determine their parameters.
@@johnolson4977 One thing I have found with the Cornwalls - they need to be placed very precisely and symmetrically in angular relations to each other. I finally captured the closest wall facing support feet in 11/16ths inch ID fender washers attached to my wood floors and precisely distanced from the rear walls. This allows me to pivot the speakers by hand without losing reference position and allows for me to play with their angles without a lot of fuss simply by measuring corner distances from the wall behind them and making sure they are exactly the same distance from the wall and therefore in complimentary angles. The shared reference pivot points eliminate the usual scuttling back and forth between the trailing and leading corners that change back and forth with freehand positioning. Playing with angles to get different effects (sound stage, imaging,etc) is a much more seamless procedure now. Laughably, I have a pretty good test for whether or not they are well positioned. On my recording of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" the beginnings of the the trumpet can be herd with spittle in the tube. It's a very subtle sound that my Cornwalls "hear." If they are not "hearing" it then there is something off about speaker placement.
Talk about evading the question of a point blank answer. He avoided it like the plague . I believe speakers do require breakin. Every new speaker I purchased sounded better, more easily relaxed after 20-100 hours of good playing time.
“Speaker burn-in” is a clever way of encouraging people to hold onto the speakers long enough to either a/ adjust to the sound or b/ allow the return period to expire.
A change of topic but I added a Schiit Modi3 and Klipsch to my Onkyo 7030 CD player and my 1970’s refurbished Pioneer sx650. A total knockout. Thank you.
This makes perfect sense, seeing as speakers are mechanical devices. The various materials flex and bend and will eventually become more supple, if you will.
I bought monitor earbuds in China for €50 and was initially very disappointed. The low frequency range between 20 and 100 Hz was weak, so I always had to turn up these frequencies on the EQ. Now after 6 weeks of listening to music, I noticed that the bass is really pumping now and I actually don't have to make any changes to the EQ. Since I also use other headphones and had the comparison all the time, I can confirm that I'm not imagining it. In addition,I only found out about this "burn in" today by chance when I read the instructions for my kz zs10 pro for the first time. There is a recommendation that I should better do a burn in before using it for the first time.I suggest just to ignore that because this will happen from time to time by itself. Beste grüße!
Usually I play loud house music through them - not at the point of about to burst but enough to get the cones moving nicely. If you have neighbours in an apartment, or if you're burning in Klipsch Jubilees and it's rock concert loud, you might need to remove the speakers and just use a sinewave. Playing "dinner music" through them is little better than letting them gather dust. Some of my mum's speakers are still factory stiff from only playing quiet music, which is okay but not getting the best bass and lower mids out of them. All of mine are soft and pliable because I liked to blast it when I was a kid - especially when my parents were out and didn't have to listen to it.
Playing music, turning it off after a couple hours of play, then waiting around 8 hours and then repeating the drill is the best way to burn in equipment. If you do it the regular way, it is going to take forever. This way it takes about 1/10 of the time. And doing it with vinyl and pink/brown/black/white noise also helps a lot.
Yes, fundamentally speaking speaker break in is a real thing. However, as Andrew pointed out, the changes that occur between a fresh off the line driver and a broken in driver occur fairly quickly. How long will it take a driver to reach it's normalized state will vary but usually anything more than ten hours and the differences you hear are more likely due to aural accommodation than changes in driver parameters. All that means is that you get used to the way your new speakers sound. Think of it like this. Sometimes you hear a new song from an artist you don't know and you can't make out all the words. Over time you hear the song enough to learn the artists phrasings and intonation so it becomes easy to understand what is being said. Subsequently, the lyrics in new songs from that same artist are much easier for you to understand. It's the same process that occurs as you learn to understand someone with a strong accent. And it's the same process with speakers. As you listen more and more you start to build a mental index of what the speaker does and the things it emphasizes or minimizes. Once your brain reaches a point where, as athletes put it, the game slows down in regards to the way your speakers resolve sound you can then hear the things that were always present but were lost in the chaos.
I've always thought that every force wether it be current flow or physical movement will find the path of least resistance and then increase the path size as a result of increased pressure around this path. I think everything has a burn in.
🙄😳Look who's talking about Rockstar you are the Rockstar for me. great review love Andrew Jones you're the best Steve the god of audio reviews... 😍❤️❤️💞💞😜😜
So I'm thinking that the thing to do with any new speakers is to input a sweep from DC to just above the woofer Fs and back, with the signal at their rated power handling capacity for the first say, ten or twenty hours, maybe 50. I would bet that not much change is likely after that. With consumer-spec units, however, I just want to see video of the excursion and maybe audio if there's one particular moment of "break-in" that stands out...
I always learn a ton from these Andrew Jones interviews and they get me thinking too. Thank you 🙏. Perhaps one reason you like 15” woofers Steve is that for a given listening level, they operate in a much more linear range than smaller woofers? Perhaps they are better coupled to the air and therefore better damped (I.e. more damping per UNIT MASS) too? 🤔
Ok, soooo.....break-in is real because it involves physical movements of parts that wear over time. And you can measure these differences. But the real question is this: Does it actually make a difference in how it sounds? And is that difference good or bad? Also, does it really matter? For most people, they either wouldn’t care or they simply can’t detect any differences, especially considering the fact that this breaking-in process occurs over time after our ears have become accustomed to the initial sound. So it becomes a sort of breaking-in equipment vs “breaking-in” our ears dilemma. Our brains can adjust to whatever sound we hear and it can vary greatly. Those really great-sounding speakers or headphones that you bought 2 months ago can suddenly sound not-so-great afterwards. There could be a variety of reasons for that including how our brains might be perceiving the sound for that given moment under whatever circumstances might be present at that time. But, later on, those same speakers or headphones sound remarkable - again, depending on the time and circumstances at the time. Those $10,000 speakers you have might sound ok when you listen to them first thing in the morning but they absolutely sing to the heavens when kicking back in your favorite recliner sipping on a fine, imported wine. I’m not denouncing the science of break-in or its effects, whether measured or imagined, but the science of psychoacoustics and our own individual interpretations of sound makes a much bigger difference in our own perceptions of sound than any break-in process. That’s why some (most) people won’t/can’t hear differences in sound between initial listenings and break-in listenings. This is why you can play a set of speakers in a room and play them for 50 people one at a time and, in theory, come away with 50 different opinions on what they heard. Break in those speakers for a certain length of time and repeat. Potentially the same outcome. Again, break-in is relevant but to whom?
I'm absolutely with you on the psychoacoustics of perception. It's a subject matter way beyond most people's understanding including scientists and engineers, and the reason for most of the audiophile and audio "experts" opinions and conjecture.
ELAC IS THE name on my turntable that i bought in Wiesbaden Germany in 1968 the turntable is actually a dual but has the largest syncroness motor I've ever seen in a turntable and the plater weighs about five pounds. I have several other turntables derect drive and they can not outperform my elac and at high volumes the elac never gets any subsonic feedback. Like the talk on speakers but i clicked on it because i thought this was about elac turntable. Still an interesting bit of speaker info.
I don't know if these comments will be read before Pt 2? I think probably not. However a question from me in a similar vein. It maybe an old wives tale but the story is that it's a good idea to turn large drivers through 180º if you buy old used speakers as after many years the voice coil can drop causing a gap mismatch. By turning them around the gap will gradually go back to where it should be and make the movement more linear. I've done this on some big Celestion's and more recently on a pair of original Klipsch Quartets. Was I impressed with the improvement? Can't really say as that may only come as they realign themselves. Another poster mentions his "old" KEF 105.1's. You might be able to try this "trick". It's bolt pattern dependant of course.
When the speakers are ‘burned in’, all that’s happening is the glues are getting worn and shaped into its repetitive wear patterns, the spider and surround are getting manipulated into its their repetitive motion pattern. Once those parts have better movement, the voice coil can move more freely and the speaker will provide better output. It’s up to the designer to make sure the selected materials overall make the speaker sound good once it’s broken in.
Anyone who has ever owned a brand-new pair of Dynaudio speakers will understand the importance of speakers settling in over time. Interestingly, they go from terrible to awesome several times until finally remaining consistently awesome after about 200 hours. The late Wes Philips, describes his experience with the Dynaudio Focus 140 exactly in his review for Stereophile. It made me laugh as it precisely mirrored my own experience.
After all, it's the voice coil and the magnet that work together to generate sound. And who would have thought that the sounds that are coming through the wire or the loop that makes up the voice Coil is also electrical And is it possible That is more current or sound that's looped around through the voice call and how it reacts to the magnet. May heat up the voice coil a little bit thus breaking it in. And the spider flexing out does it too
THIS was the moment of SHIFT in audiophile discussions about speaker break in. You have witnessed history, people. Live, love, and prosper...and don’t waste time trying to break in what’s already broken in.
The easy way to explain it to people is to ask them if they've ever had leather shoes and if they fit better after a few wears. Same basic idea with speaker drivers.
I bought a pair of fairly expensive Illusion Audio car speakers. For the first four months I hated them and assumed I wasted my money. Then, one day I found myself really enjoying them. I continued to enjoy them for about another six months until one of the drivers seized and stopped working entirely. It was replaced under warranty and now I am in the break in period again. Alas.
Andrew, you mentioned "conditioning" woofers before measuring the T/S parameters, but I wonder how many manufacturers do this to their production line drivers. I used to work for a woofer manufacturer and we did exactly what you said when we measured a sample, but never before we boxed production drivers for shipping.
Correct. A well designed box will have an air suspension that totally dominates the driver behaviour! Audible break in only occurs with inadequately designed speakers where resonance is not controlled and small compliance changes may be audible. Woofer drivers with small voice coils will heat up and sound dull every time they are pushed
Didn't believe much in burn-in until I got a pair of Spendor S3/5R2. The bass became noticeably more abundant after about 20 hours of use. The change was profound. On a couple of other pairs of speakers I didn't notice much, if any change during the break-in cycle.
I'm so glad that this is the topic I bought a new pair of speakers over a month ago and because of the virus I've had the opportunity to break in my new speakers I'm not sure either way right now if there is a difference however from what I'm hearing from the video my speakers have to be going through a changing process thank you Steve great information
I bought klipsh RP600M's based on this dudes recomendation and a cursory listen at magnolia room at best buy. When I got mine home they sound flat with a huge void between the highs and lows. after 2 or 3 weeks of listening i can hear the bass getting fuller, and the hole between highs and lows filled in a bit. any one that says ITS YOUR EARS when you say new speakers dont sound as good a fool.
1. If, by pure mechanical action a speaker's sound changes at a break in point, why would it be a better sound, why not worse? Could it not turn out either way? 2. If at the 150 or 200 hour mark a speaker's sound changes (to the better???) then what keeps the speaker from making another change at the 400h or 2000 hour mark. The same force that originally caused the "broken in" sound is still there! If this logic holds true, an Elac should, in due time, end up with a Klipsh sound (or vice versa) 3. How is it that the great advances in speaker engineering have failed to create a speaker to sound as intended without an "abuse" by the consumer. If a speaker can be designed with a "house sound" (Elac, B&W, Wharfadale) then the science and engineering must exist. It appears to me that this whole "break in" idea is more about marketing than anything else.
I've just recently had to repair my woofers from my Polk M5 studio series monitors. Bought two pair with three drivers totally let loose around the entire circumference of the spider. Five minute epoxy- precision hobby swabs- dental pick to lift the spider as epoxy is applied and a nine volt battery to suck the voice coil into perfect center as it forces the spider into compliance thereby effectively clamping it down until the epoxy kicks and VOILA! Good as new. Question is: now that I've got the front baffle removed, should I add some DYNAMAT and a nice thick layer of poly fill?.....
Whoah, Andrew Jones! The MAN! Great guest, Steve! Far as the break in? Someone can just shoot video of a speaker playing a song at no-hours break-in, then at 100 hours - see if there's a different toggling back and forth between the two. To me, it's a stupid question. Most things do break in - how can speakers be different? I mean, to logic there is none? Your shoes or jeans never wear in. Seriously, that's a stupid question.
Tedious measure-bator comments. There is both subjective and objective aspects of every human experience. Do you also demand measurements for love, friendship
@@TheYuhasz01 - LOL! Hearing things which are not present in sound is called auditory hallucinations. Enjoy your hallucinations. Your attempt to equate love and friendship with physics and biology is very weak, lol. Please stop that shit.
@@r423sdex - Go find them yourself. Go prove it yourself. Get a pair of speakers, film them brand new, then after 100 hours, see if you hear a difference between the two. Idiot. Nobody owes you measurements. Get them yourself.
Interesting conversation, but limited to spiders. A whole different conversation can be had about corrugated paper cones where decoupling occurs at different radii with different frequencies and there’s a hysteresis damping effect occurring within the the “paper” fibers of the the cone....there will inevitably some fatigue associated with this process over time....hence this can become an immensely complicated subject matter if one really wants to split hairs, thus best to leave it in the subjunctive realms
So there is somehow some hope if you don't like the sound of those new speaker you just bought. Burn-in time may not just be about getting to like what you have instead of getting what you like. :-) All the audio dealers in the world must be relieved!
Your not crazy Steve, The problem is that the phrase "break-in" or "burn-in" is thrown around a lot loosely. It really only applies to certain things. Andrew explained this in full science mode, which he is known to do, a lot and I love it because I love physics and studied it a little at university so I understand it mostly. Simply put as I like to tell folks is that "break-in" applies to mechanics over electronics. Example: Speakers are electro-mechanical, if you will. The crossover is electronics, but as Andrew said the surrounds, spider, voice coil...are mechanical governed by physics or surface physics, if you will (air, motion, time, mass....). I say surface physics to separate atomic level physics, because that is a whole other level. So yes, a speaker will change slightly in sound over time from when new. Same thing with a phono cartridge. You have much the same things involved there plus electromagnetism. I like to think of phono carts like shocks on your car. When you get new shocks on your car, you may notice a slightly stiffer ride than you were used to, but after a few miles (let's just call 100 miles for now), you may notice more smoothness as the shocks settle in. Now an example of where "break-in" or "burn-in" does not apply would be solid-state gear (amps, dacs, etc). With solid-state we are talking atomic level physics and 1's and 0's in some cases. Both are either on or off (instantly to us). Your solid-state amp will sound the same really at 1 hour, 10 hours, 100 hours..... What can make it appear to sound different (in fact, your whole system) is atmospheric pressure, environmental noise level (even notice how sometimes your system sounds a little different at say 8:00pm than it does at 1:00pm?), etc. We can eve make our systems sound different on purpose with placement, room treatment and other tweaks. One sure time when you will hear a difference with solid-state is if your amp is giving up or something. God I miss visiting with Andrew! I'm glad my county is now going to phase 2 of "back to normal" because now maybe with extra luck, I can get a day off and go visit my friend Andrew! It has been over a year!
Burn-in is real, I bought Sony MDR-XB450 On-Ear EXTRA BASS headphones in 2017, I was disappointed the way it sounded then. Gradually the sound started getting better and better and today I hear sounds which I've never heard in last couple of years. It now sounds with so much of clarity on the same songs I've been hearing over the years. So, Burn-in is something I've personally experienced it so it is REAL.
@Ravi Shankar: You are just suffering from the placebo effect, buddy. If you think that mechanical things can somehow get better while in usage, you should probably go back to school and learn some physics. The more you use your equipment, the more they wear down ... and the quality will not go up from there, it can only go down.
@@Historia.Magistra.Vitae. its not placebo or conditioning your brain. Buy a set heddphones, play a song you are VERY familiar with, then run them in with frequency sweeps from 10hz to 22khz for a few days. Then listen to your favourite song again. Youll notice many details start to pop. Try it, youll hear the difference.
@@AbsoluteFidelity : That's not how reality works, buddy. The more you use your equipment, the more it wears down. Every moving part is slowly getting worse when it comes to quality... nobody would be able to sell new headphones if they would start magically sound better and better the more you use them. 🤣
@@Historia.Magistra.Vitae. thats so far from the truth it isnt funny. Take speakers for an example, there are mechanical moving parts like the surround, spider, etc. All those need to be strectched, as Andrew Jones explained in this video. We all know mechanical parts need to broken in, regardless what is it on. To say that mechanical parts wont change and settle in after a burn in period is laughable at best.
@@AbsoluteFidelity : There is a big difference between mechanical parts changing and settling over time... and things getting better and better over time. Former happens, latter does not.
1. How does the speaker designer know how it will sound after it breaks in? 2. If the process starts and things get freer and looser than at some point they will get too loose or free. He mentioned 'creep'. So why are drivers not sold with a stated life like lcd panels? 3. Why don't manufacturers break them in at the factory then? No it doesn't reduce production output. If you were making 50 speakers a week then after an initial delay of 100 hours you'll again be making 50 speakers a week.
It adds production cost. sampling batches for T/S and measurement consistency would surely take less equipment and people time than running every driver in for 100 hours. So... do you add that cost and pass it onto the customer? no.
I've used to run white noise at a moderate level for 24 hours, after which I listen to music without particular considerations taken (I normally listen at just 75-85 dB anyway, so there is little risk of any "undue stress"). There is some improvement during the first 100-200 hours, but this is not something I've had to do very often. All my speakers have been around 90 dB sensitivity, so the "moderate level" during the first 24 hours have not been excessive, which I imagine would have been beneficial for very sensitive speakers like Klipsch, etc.
@@bencausey Good for him. He doesn't have a time machine to tell me that in the past, and whenever I build speakers, I doubt that the raw drivers have been conditioned before they left the factory.
Andrew only spoke about the spider, surely the rubber roll surround of a bass unit changes in compliance as it is worked repeatedly. Also it would change with temperature too such as in a hot room ?
Let’s err on the side of, Andrew knows almost infinitely more than we do about speakers. Andrew Jones just stated that YOUR SPEAKERS WERE BROKEN IN BEFORE YOU BOUGHT THEM.
So I ask the following: With today's possibilities of producing drivers very precisely with the smallest of tolerances, why are spiders still used when one knows of the problems they create. I remember a video created by the NEAR division of Bogen Communications Inc. that shows how playback is distorted by a spider.