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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Breaking-In Speakers: A Myth? posted by NGeorge on March 30, 2009 at 11:09:35:
This is the same fight that has been going on for years. I'd submit the following:
#1. People often "hear" differences after time with a given product. There doesn't seem to be much consistency in subjective changes outside of the fact that the loudspeaker usually improves in quality. Sometimes it has to do with tweeter performance, sometimes bass.
#2. Measured differences in woofers is restricted to compliance changes. The compliance of a woofer is the only measured quantity that changes and it also changes with temp. There is also some degree of break-in that occurs on each use. Also, a simple T/S parameter measurement is only a small signal level measurement. If you take a Klippel of the woofer you see that compliance varies with stroke under normal operation. Compliance changes tend to only affect low frequency behavior and often very little. If you model the box and the resultant response, often there just isn't much difference.
#3. There is no reliable research that indicates an electrical mechanism for break-in.
#4. There is no reliable research that shows a blind audience being able to detect differences between broken-in and non broken-in loudspeakers. There is some natural variation in any product run and those slight differences among drivers and crossovers tends to be a much larger variable than any difference you can measure with compliance change after the first couple hours of use. Spiders typically have a +/- 15-20% variance in compliance in a normal production run so a 5% change due to break-in is well within that range of production tolerance.
So.... my take on it is that the most probably explanation for break-in is that we get more used to how they sound after time. It is mainly a psycoacoustic phenomena. I don't have any proof other than the above observations and I commonly feel that speakers sound better after time. I just think it is more likely to do with my brain/ears than it does with the copper, capacitors and transducers changing in some way that makes a significant difference in how they sound.
Just my opinion of course.... ;-)
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Follow Ups
- My take... - Kevin P 04/1/0911:32:07 04/1/09 (0)
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