"Break In" period....How Long ??

[AVMike]

what is the proper break in for new 5.1 speakers ? and how long should you follow this break in before really cranking it up ? thanks

 

[its phillip]

Just use them normally.

 

[zhimbo]

Psychological break-in - getting used to the sound and really starting to listen - is at least as important as physical break in and takes just as long. In most cases, it's almost certainly the overwhelming factor. Evidence that audible changes occur due to break-in is pretty weak, although various anecdotal reports will swear it's a huge dramatic thing (while the overwhelmingly larger number of people who don't notice anything and therefore don't talk about the non-event of no break-in get overlooked entirely.)

 

[afterlife2]

Just Crank it!

 

[markw]

If break-in is a real, physical/mechanical issue, the ones own ears would tell them when it's been accomplished.

 

[zieglj01]

13.135790 minutes, or long enough to make a sandwich and a drink.

 

[Alex2507]

If break-in is a real, physical/mechanical issue, the ones own ears would tell them when it's been accomplished.

I think the change would be too gradual to notice with any reliability. Touching on the 'is it real' aspect I once asked a guy from the BAS and he said something about it depending on a particular T/S parameter and the size of the box. So 'sometimes' would seem to be the appropriate answer according to that guy. His answer was worded better and he knew his way around speakers.

 

[j_garcia]

Search is your friend.

http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/beginners-audiophytes/88252-how-long-does-take-break-speakers.html

 

[Rickster71]

Just my $0.02
I generally don't believe in speaker break-in, but.

When The Speaker Company was around, they had a sale and I bought a pair of their floor standers and book shelves.
(They were the old Sapphire speakers) http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/loudspeakers/52094-speaker-company-tst2-floorstanding-speaker-review.html
They were priced so low I couldn't past it up. Just something to use in a spare room.

Long story short. I hauled them upstairs, set them up and put in a familiar CD and instantly hated them.
I walked downstairs pissed that I'd wasted money, not realizing I left the CD playing.
About an hour later I went back upstairs and replayed the CD to confirm my suspicions, before sending them back.
The second time they sounded fine. I didn't get used to them, because I couldn't hear them downstairs.
For me, in this one instance, I experienced speaker break-in. Probably because they're cheap speakers?
The surround is a flexible joint, not unlike one in a new baseball glove.
Don't think speaker break in takes very long at all in comparison to a glove.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

 

[Swerd]

what is the proper break in for new 5.1 speakers ? and how long should you follow this break in before really cranking it up ? thanks

Others have already suggested that a break in period for speakers probably does not exist – and I agree. But they are talking about if we hear a difference in a speaker's sound after it has been played for a number of hours.

The OP is asking about break in similar to how we used to break in the engine of a new car. The answer is still the same, zero hours. Unlike a gasoline engine, a speaker has no metal-to-metal moving parts that can generate metal fragments. We never need to "change the oil and filter" in a speaker.

You can play your new speakers without fear of damage, as long as you don't drive them so loud that they audibly complain.

If you just got them, and they were in a cold warehouse or delivery truck, let them warm up to room temperature before cranking them. Other than that, don't worry about speaker break in.

 

[Pyrrho]

Burn-in is basically BS:

There is no need to speculate about this. It has been measured. It is basically a non-issue:

Speaker Break In: Fact or Fiction? | Audioholics

There are tiny, tiny measurable differences, but they are not going to generally be audible.

A couple of choice quotes:

From the foregoing analyses, it's reasonable to conclude that suspension compliance changes arising as a consequence of initial driver burn in has little effect on the performance of a loudspeaker system.

​

And:

Normal production unit-to-unit driver spec variances can affect final amplitude response of a system to a larger degree than that expected from normal pre- post-burn in driver suspension compliance changes.
​

In other words, if you are not ROUTINELY hearing differences between different speaker drivers of the same model, you are NOT hearing differences from speaker "burn in."

In other words, the idea that "burn in" affects the sound is essentially pure BS.

 

[j_garcia]

Just my $0.02
I generally don't believe in speaker break-in, but.

When The Speaker Company was around, they had a sale and I bought a pair of their floor standers and book shelves.
(They were the old Sapphire speakers) http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/loudspeakers/52094-speaker-company-tst2-floorstanding-speaker-review.html
They were priced so low I couldn't past it up. Just something to use in a spare room.

Long story short. I hauled them upstairs, set them up and put in a familiar CD and instantly hated them.
I walked downstairs pissed that I'd wasted money, not realizing I left the CD playing.
About an hour later I went back upstairs and replayed the CD to confirm my suspicions, before sending them back.
The second time they sounded fine. I didn't get used to them, because I couldn't hear them downstairs.
For me, in this one instance, I experienced speaker break-in. Probably because they're cheap speakers?
The surround is a flexible joint, not unlike one in a new baseball glove.
Don't think speaker break in takes very long at all in comparison to a glove.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Perhaps not the drivers that broke in or actually the iron core inductors reached a "functioning" point:

I did note a few iron core inductors that I’d prefer to be air core for improved sound quality via reduced saturation effects

PLUS, however many beers you had in that hour

 

[AVMike]

thanks for links, very interesting info.

 

[markw]

see? Just like I said.

Just my $0.02
I generally don't believe in speaker break-in, but.

When The Speaker Company was around, they had a sale and I bought a pair of their floor standers and book shelves.
(They were the old Sapphire speakers) http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/loudspeakers/52094-speaker-company-tst2-floorstanding-speaker-review.html
They were priced so low I couldn't past it up. Just something to use in a spare room.

Long story short. I hauled them upstairs, set them up and put in a familiar CD and instantly hated them.
I walked downstairs pissed that I'd wasted money, not realizing I left the CD playing.
About an hour later I went back upstairs and replayed the CD to confirm my suspicions, before sending them back.
The second time they sounded fine. I didn't get used to them, because I couldn't hear them downstairs.
For me, in this one instance, I experienced speaker break-in. Probably because they're cheap speakers?
The surround is a flexible joint, not unlike one in a new baseball glove.
Don't think speaker break in takes very long at all in comparison to a glove.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Your ears told you when it was done!

 

[jinjuku]

what is the proper break in for new 5.1 speakers ? and how long should you follow this break in before really cranking it up ? thanks

It will be around 4000 hours. Just crank em up and leave the house for the duration

 

[j_garcia]

>------------------------------------------------------------< that long.

 

[ImcLoud]

I don't really believe in break in, I have put a lot of time on a lot of speakers and never noticed a real noteworthy change in performance.. I remember I was in a high end store {outside of LA} and they were selling a "break in" disc, they had 2 separate ones, one for HT {said something like "up to 12.4 surround sound" and one for stereo. Advertised "perfect break in"... They were like $59.99 each, or something silly..

 

[2ndammendment]

We just had an insightful discussion about this over in my thread ( http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/loudspeakers/89051-head-head-review-ascend-acoustics-cbm-170-se-vs-wharfedale-diamond-10-1-a-8.html ), it starts at post #70. This is my post, for what its worth I haven't noticed any change occurring with the 3 speakers I tested the past few days.

"I can't say I'm a believer of speakers breaking in. Ive read just about everything you can find about the subject. From the research I've done, its your ears/brain breaking in more than anything else. Sure theres mechanical changes that occur and they may alter the sound of a speaker slightly but I doubt I could hear the difference. Theres a larger measurable difference attributed to the voice coil heating up and surrounds loosening up during extended playback than there is from breaking in alone, so any difference that there would be, would likely be masked by the dynamic changes that occur as the speakers are being played(I'll tell you the truth, I cant hear the difference between a heated voice coil and a cold one)."

 

[Ampdog]

Can only support the two points in the quote of Pyrrho by himself, as well as similar posts of others. At least two manufacturers have pointed out (apart from independant research) that the production difference between identical type drivers can be as large as 8%, while the greatest and infrequent measured change after so-called 'burn-in' was about 2%. This phenomenon comes mostly from the famous source "anecdotal evidence". Many driver manufacturers give their units a slight run-in before leaving the factory. I have also yet to read any remotely feasible account of what it is in a driver that will undergo audible changes during this alleged period. Some investigations showed that, in certain areas, cyclic changes in the air density as a result of weather conditions will have a more significant influence on the sound of a loudspeaker than alleged 'burn-in'.

[As the misnomer suggests (and not wishing to start another war-of-words), this, like so many other similar urban legends, is an erroneous if not unnatural spin-off from well known things mechanical. Closer inspection reveals little if any corresponcence.]

PS: Not dismissing the experience by Rickster71, but the time duration of his observation was far too short to suggest 'classic loudspeaker burn-in' for the usual reasons, even if that could have been possible. There were other possibilities.

 

[mtrycrafts]

>------------------------------------------------------------< that long.

You left off the unit of measurement. Is that in inches? Meters? milliseconds? Hours?