Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

RE: is speaker break-in real?

Well, you are saying that something changed as you listened to your speakers over a period. It may have been the speaker, it may have been you or (for logical purposes) it may have been something else.

As you have reached your conclusion only by deduction I would suggest that more is needed to to validate it.

You have made the assumption that because the tweeter manufacturer started the company for medical research in the area of hearing and uses sophisticated design procedures that the quality if the drivers is such that variations in performance could (or should?) not occur. I have to say that seems to be a non-sequitur. Even if it is assumed that each driver measures identically as they come off the production line there isn't anything in that by itself to indicate that they would not change, by whatever degree, over time in use.

In order to help validate your conclusion you would, for example, need to listen to the pair that you have become used to in direct comparison to a pair with identical specification that came straight from the factory. If you had and if, for the purposes of argument, they sounded effectively identical , would you have been able to guarantee that the pair straight out of the factory was completely unused and that they e.g. hadn't been running on test there for days?

Did you eliminate the " something else" effect, for example an un-notified improvement to your local mains electical supply at the point where you thought that the speakers now sounded better to you? You mentioned power fluctuations but that is not the only factor affecting mains supply which may affect the sound that you hear from your system.

As you reached the conclusion that it was you that had changed in some way by becoming used to them did you have your hearing measured before and after you reached the point of realising that you preferred them now to originally? Perhaps something physiological rather than psychological altered.

One can go on and on adding new relevant matters for consideration.

I am simply making the point that arriving at a valid conclusion on matters such as this may be complex and require considerable effort beyond what just seems to be the case.

Incidentally I recently had the tweeters in my own loudspeakers changed (co-incidentally from SEAS) and I was certainly under the impression that I preferred the result after a couple of weeks of playing the revised speakers even though they sounded great to me from the outset. The effect certainly seems subjectively real as far as I am concerned but, if so, was it me, the speaker or something else? I don't know.


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