Burn in - a myth?

We’re dangerously close here to disappearing down one of those rabbit holes where tempers can get frayed because people seem to have such strong opinions on this subject and everyone is convinced that they are right.

I can only say that personally speaking I don’t beleive that it’s necessary to verify my observations with any scientific assessment. I’m not running a lab here - I’m listening to music on my hi-fi. I’ve experienced burn-in phenomena with various bits of kit where the sound has changed markedly over time. I know it has because I’ve heard it - with my ears.

The nay-sayers will claim that I’ve simply imagined it and that I’ve just grown accustomed to the sound. I can’t prove them wrong, and neither can they prove me wrong. So it’s stale mate and endless posts of arguing and bickering - let’s not go there!

I will just say, what I’ve said before, and that is that I’ve never had anybody explain to me why I should imagine changes in the sound of my hi-fi system when I don’t imagine changes in say my television picture or the colour of my lounge walls or in the size of my garden or anything else. The only thing I’m apparently prone to imagining is that the sound of my hi-fi can change under certain conditions.

9 Likes

I’ve given a few example of this before in the forums, but while I do believe items do experience burn in (& have experienced it), I also fully believe (& its not hard to back up as posted below) that our brains/hearing adapts. Couple examples, I’ll try & keep short.

Bought a new power cable, first installed it & while it was very detailed, I found it rather fatiguing. I listened for a few days & it was sounding much better, still detailed but smoother/less fatiguing. I assumed burning in but out of curiosity I swapped my previous cord back in & it now sounded rather dark/lacking details. I gave it a number of hours & it was back to how it initially sounded.

At one point ran two setups, the small one, due to the room/speakers had a vary pronounced mid bass hump. One week I exclusively listened to this setup (very run in kit) & not really thinking about it noticed how it was sounding better & better. After the 3rd or 4th night, I noticed the mid bass hump had disappeared, which I found odd. I curiously went & listened to the “big” system & sure enough it now sounded like it had a mid bass suck out.

So from my experience, unless you have some other point of reference, how do you know if its actual burn in or your brain/ears adapting as it can be a combination of both. Any piece of kit I’ve kept has sounded good from the get go & stayed the same or improved over time. If it sounds terrible initially, its probably not something I want to keep, though I would fully let it run in & keep another point of reference to confirm if the change in sound was good or not.

These above examples are just of few reasons why I have a hard time when people talk about run in hundreds of hours on/months on, that they then are claiming improvements when they have no point of reference (or when they compare to kit they haven’t owned in in months/years), if its not your current point of reference, your hearing will have adapted.

Again, I’m not claiming burn in doesn’t exist, but I know for a fact, if all our brains/hearing works the same, your brain/hearing will also compensate & the only was to know for sure is to have another point of reference &/or don’t listen to the component for anymore then a few min at a time during the so called burn-in period, so as to not allow yourself to adapt to the sound.

3 Likes

Daren,

The problem with all this is that one can go round and round in circles and postulate all manner of pyschological effects, none of which it is possible to ‘prove’ in any kind of meaningful way. I have been involved in these discussions on this forum in the past and on other forums as well. They always end badly.

One makes one’s own choice. I’ve recently bought a Chord Qutest DAC and Chord Company Epic X RCA cable to connect it to my amp. The sound changed very significantly over a few weeks use. It was good to start with but now sounds far better - much deeper bass, less glare, more dynamic, better musical flow etc. etc. I know this because I’ve heard it. No question in my mind. If someone wants to think that I’ve imagined it all and in fact it sounds no better than it did when I first plugged it in then that’s fine. No skin off my nose.

I prefer you see to trust my own ears and judgements than to trust someone else’s opinion who has never even heard my system yet thinks they know better than I do what I’m hearing.

3 Likes

Don’t my examples prove exactly that, that are brains/ears do adapt? Again, not saying it wasn’t a change from burn in & not doubting the changes you heard, but if you kept no other reference to compare against, how do you know the change was from burn in an not your ears/brain adapting (or some combination of both).

My take

As far as I’m concerned this process comprises of two things.
1.
Mechanical things that move bearings ,coils, drive units etc all benefit from running in to create a consistent mating norm.
And operating temperature .

Electric components all have an ideal range operating temperature to optimise and stabilise performance.

Everything else is simply getting used to the new sound you hear becoming accustomed.

As for cables they are what they are a component in the chain with its own signature.

1 Like

It’s very lucky that everything ‘burns in’ better. I’m not aware of anything that gets worse during the burn-in process. :thinking::wink:

2 Likes

@Guinnless
I agree completely and said so a while ago.
Get ready for the incoming. :scream: :rofl:

1 Like

Surely that would be ‘burn-out’

3 Likes

Darren,

Take a look at the posts following your post and you can see that things are just beginning to deteriorate. This always happens in threads of this kind. There are the believers and the non-believers in the same room and then eventually civilised discussion becomes all-out armageddon of which there are no survivors. The thread is typically pulled.

I hear what you’re saying. How do I know that I’m really typing this response without some reference to prove it? How do I know that I’m not just imagining it? What I’m trying to say is that the reality of the situation is that we don’t have any independant references for anything. All we have is the information provided by our senory organs to our brain.

We make judgements from our senses based on our experience of the world, on common sense and on what we judge to be the most likely scenario. We do this all the time with everything.

So to answer your question - I can’t prove anything in the sense of it being an irrefutable fact with independant evidence and frames of reference that I am able to present to you. This would be nigh on impossible. But my experience of the world, my hi-fi system and of myself means that I’m in no doubt about what I’ve experienced.

I’ll say it again - I don’t imagine anything else so why should I imagine changes in my hi-fi system that do not really occur? I’ve asked this several times and no-one has given me a reason yet.

2 Likes

BURN-IN,.an obvious and established fact…or…??
YES,.FOR ME…!!

I also log my “burn in” periods of different products…
This is to see if there are repeatable results of “burn in” that can be demonstrated,.which it is.

:small_orange_diamond:An example of many:
This year,.among many other things,I have performed a “burn in” on two of Burson Audio’s top-notch head-amp products before evaluation.
:small_orange_diamond:Conductor 3X
Reference
:small_orange_diamond:Conductor 3X
Grand Tourer
(Both with Bursons top-notch Super Charger powersupply)
Both had a major noticeable change for the better in the soundquality between…
• 110 to 115 hours
• 160 to 165 hours
I performed this burn-in for 200 hours constantly on a playlist.

Gain your own experience by conducting your own protocoled “burn in” experiments of new…
• head-amps
• head-phones
• speakers
• cables
…etc etc…

My new headphones,.Hifiman HE 1000SE I gave them a burn-in period of 150 hours,according to Hifiman’s recommendations.
There was a noticeable improvement in the musical presentation.

1 Like

Sadly that is often the case - for some inexplicable reason people seem to lose their cool with this sort of subject, yet there is no reason to. It is perfectly possible to discuss calmly and rationally, no matter how opposite the viewpoints, It often seems almost as if some people don’t want a thread to continue so start getting belligerent or unpleasant.

2 Likes

Peder,

A valliant attempt at trying to validate your experiences in some way.

The problem is that people will still say - you are just using your ears you are not using scientific measuring instruments, you are imagining changes, you are adapting to changes etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.

I’m afraid you can’t win. The people who do not believe in the phenomenon of burn-in have made up their minds based on nothing but their own erroneous beliefs and lack of sufficient scientific insight which leads to them.

It is like a self-fullfilling prophecy. You see, unlike us, they do not trust their own ears. So if they do hear something changing they explain it away by imagination. Because you see they already ‘just know’ that it cannot possibly be happening.

It is rather like having a belief that all cows are brown. So on a trip to the countryside one day they spot what appears, horror of horrors, to be a black and white cow. Their conclusion? Since it is not brown it cannot possibly be a cow.

These people have already made up their minds. They dismiss any evidence to the contrary as it does not fit their erroneous belief system.

1 Like

It’s probably time for me to bow out as I feel very close to pulling the pin.

OK yes.

So let’s have a proper reasoned and rational discussion.

Forget all the trick-cyclist clap-trap. That comes later. Let’s go right back to basics.

So would anyone like to take the podium and tell us all why you believe that the phenomenon of burn-in is not a real one? What has caused you to form that belief?

Rather than, say, 50 years of designing electronics including wiring harnesses?

(Asking for a friend…)

Good evening everyone,

This really is too much! - “… I know what I hear …”, “… common sense …”, “… I don’t imagine anything else …”. Each of us is a maelstrom of contradictions, with views, preferences, un-founded assumptions prejudices, fears and dogmas changing with the regularity of night and day.

Sometimes I think that my system is really singing, sometimes, not so much. Sometimes I really enjoy listening to artist X, sometimes not. Sometimes I would rather just watch television. There may or may not be subtle or not-so-subtle changes happening in our systems over the course of a day, or a week, or a month, but there are also changes happening in the atmosphere, our minds and heaven knows where else. Consequently, it is very difficult reliably to assign change to a single cause.

The problem, of course, is that it is virtually impossible to carry out a valid listening test in, say, a cable in a genuinely scientific way when it is embedded in a live system. The scientific method requires control of all of the variables, except the variable under test, but this really isn’t practical in a domestic setting - still less in a busy shop on a Saturday afternoon! Indeed, in this thread and others, many members recommend that a potential buyer should try to take home the product in question, to listen with “my ears, my system, my room”, etc. This is a tacit recognition of the need to try to control the variables as much as possible, but I suspect that the most unruly variable is one’s ears. Actually, even assigning this variable to human ears is a very unreliable short-cut. The day’s experiences, the state of inter-personal relations, expectation, wine, what tomorrow holds and all sorts of other things will influence our perception of what we hear today and every day. It’s not the ears, it’s the brain.

Here’s a simple question. If you listened to any of Sinead O’Connor’s music six weeks ago, was your emotional reaction to it the same as when you listened to the same music in the last week? Probably not, but the difference probably didn’t come from any changes in your system - far from it!

Finally, an anecdote – some years ago, I was in the habit of walking in the woods and the mountains with a good friend. Over the course of our conversations through the years, it was clear that, as he looked around at the natural world, he was more and more certain of God’s work. I, on the other hand, was more and more certain that there is no God. (PJL, someone was imagining something and I’ll bet that you actually do imagine some things - in some settings it’s called empathy)

“Burn in - a myth?” is almost certainly very stoney ground indeed.

Best wishes,

Brian D.

2 Likes

The have their own beliefs and experiences of which they are entitled to. Your italicised comment can equally be applied to your own opinion.

I think it’s fair to say that most people accept for example that serviced pre-amp will generally improve over the next couple of weeks for so. Same for new loudspeakers.

Once it starts expanding to cables, plugs and fuses things start to get a bit implausible for some :nerd_face:

1 Like

You could equally apply that to those who do believe in burn-in. Being from a technical background I’m afraid I fall in to the non believer camp, other than speakers and normal warm up periods for amps etc. I am aware of the effect though but put it down to cognitive/expectation bias. The old chestnut of doing a double blind test would be a good and relatively easy way to put things to the test but weirdly the mere mention of it sets people off, you’d have to wonder why that might be? Anyway, each to their own.

2 Likes

I don’t believe in burn in of cables. There I’ve said it, but I have never heard it. Then again I’m only 68 years of age so perhaps there’s still time. :grin:

2 Likes

Isn’t this the point in the discussion where someone chips in with a smug ‘I just listen to my music, not the cables’?