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In Reply to: RE: is speaker break-in real? posted by PAR on June 19, 2017 at 08:15:52
As a machinist I made jet engine parts to quite high tolerances. We've been making jet engines longer than I've been alive, so your thinking engine break in has something to do with machining abilities is hilarious.It was thought at the time it was better to let the rings seat themselves into the cast iron cylinder walls, thus making a better seal. Nowadays with aluminum blocks and heads with nikasil cylinder liners etc this technique has been virtually abandoned in gasoline engines.
Martin
Edits: 06/19/17 06/19/17 06/20/17Follow Ups:
Thank you for the interesting correction. However it still fits with my contention that " However available materials and techniques have improved substantially over the intervening years so what may once have been a common requirement may no longer be so".
I would think the quality of the driver would effect the consistency of the results over time, since they are high tolerance motors at heart, and deviations from manufacturing specifications are usually considered signs of future failure.
I can see how a speaker with a paper surround would change with use, and also see newer , designs with materials that can handle many flex cycles with little change.
MY speakers sounded good when new, and were even more pleasing as I got used to them. Since I had read so much about break in, I thought that is what I had heard.
But then, on second thought , even though I heard it, it was nonsense. The quality of the drivers precluded such variations in performance. The S.E.A..S driver company was founded by a medical researcher who needed more accuracy in drivers to run the hearing test he needed. So this company made custom medical research grade drivers for my speakers, and the resultant consistent performance was part of the super computer aided design. Radical or mild changes in audio perception doesn't jive with anything except brain or power fluctuations in my case. What I heard was me getting settled into the new speakers .
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.
Hi beach cruiser,"High quality" can be defined in different ways, but parts with high creep may afford a good mechano-acoustic benefit in one aspect(such as high loss factor and thus good dampening of resonances,) while it may afford a detriment in another (such as large change with break-in or change in properties in response to drive level.) High creep may not be indicative of a higher propensity of eventual product failure - I'm thinking here of how IIR or many dampened cloths behave, for example.
For these reasons trying to associate creep with quality is tricky.
Thanks,
Mark
Edits: 06/30/17
yes
drivers break in
tubes, caps do as well
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