[GBDG1]

I needed some temporary cheap in ear headphones for listening to lastfm while working. I'm not shy but wearing Grado's with Yellow Foam in a public place is abit too far for me.

Anyway, I decided on a pair of HMV own brand ear buds at £3.99. At first I got pretty much what I expected, they are pretty awful in every department.

Bass - poor
Treble - poor
Speration - poor
Soundstage - May as well be in mono

Anyway I've probably put about 40 hours on these in the last week and they've started to sound good! Now, there is no way in hell these headphones could ever sound good. The only explaination - I must have just adapted to their sound.

Finally I understand how the hell people can stick with the apple ibuds.

This has seriously made me question burn in on my decent cans. What do you think?

[ijd]

perhaps the heat generated caused the wax in your ears to melt and run inwards leaving you with a clear ear canal

[Steven]

Your use of pronouns answers your own question - it is all subjective

For example I swear burn-in has settled my Shure E4s and Westone UM2s in nicely. Bass on the E4s stretched out a little and became more prominent for example. More recently I had burned in my UM2s with the latest fad of pink noise

Music is in the ear of the beholder (that doesn't sound right? ). If £3.99 'phones sound good to you, you've saved yourself a bundle Besides, it is about the music lest we forget

[Reano]

Originally Posted by Lawrenzini

I needed some temporary cheap in ear headphones for listening to lastfm while working. I'm not shy but wearing Grado's with Yellow Foam in a public place is abit too far for me.

Anyway, I decided on a pair of HMV own brand ear buds at £3.99. At first I got pretty much what I expected, they are pretty awful in every department.

Bass - poor
Treble - poor
Speration - poor
Soundstage - May as well be in mono

Anyway I've probably put about 40 hours on these in the last week and they've started to sound good! Now, there is no way in hell these headphones could ever sound good. The only explaination - I must have just adapted to their sound.

Finally I understand how the hell people can stick with the apple ibuds.

This has seriously made me question burn in on my decent cans. What do you think?

Like others have said all you need to disprove that burnin in has made your £3.99 cans, into wander phones is just get some better ones then you will realise ....

[diggler46]

I believe in the fact that you get used to it. When we first got the new car the speakers I thought sounded awful .Now after a few weeks they sound fine to me. Same with the lcd. At first sd looked awful, but now after a month or two it looks fine.....

[mattski73]

i think burn in is important and needed. how long a period the headphones need to burn in is of course diferent.

i wasn't impressed with my ultrasone's straight out of the box, but after an hour or so the bass started to sound fuller and deeper. the mid and treble however needed alot longer.

my koss porta pro's truned up yesterday and they were horrid. today at uni, they sounded, i lttle better especially in the mid and highs.

do i believe in burn in?? yep!

[JimBob1971]

One way to test this is to buy another set of £3.99 headphones. Mark the cable of one, stick on a blindfold and randomly choose one of the sets (my suggestion is the time honoured fashion of first one out of a hat ) After listening plug in the other pair.

This way you'll have answered the question, and all for a measly £3.99!

[GBDG1]

Originally Posted by JimBob1971

One way to test this is to buy another set of £3.99 headphones. Mark the cable of one, stick on a blindfold and randomly choose one of the sets (my suggestion is the time honoured fashion of first one out of a hat ) After listening plug in the other pair.

This way you'll have answered the question, and all for a measly £3.99!

well £7.98

[Knox]

I have just purchased new headphones, Ultrasone HFI-2200 ULE

I was skeptical about burn-in but tried it and found there is indeed a definite improvement after fifty hours, so I’m going for more, maybe two hundred hours

Hi-fi fanatics have always recommended to burn in new speakers so it makes sense that it should work with headphones too !

Remember to look after your hearing

Long listening sessions – low volume, while studying etc
Short listening sessions – higher volume for excitement !

[Knox]

Well !

Some response would be appreciated !

Even if it's '**** off' !

[StevieDvd]

Whilst in speakers and headphones with moving parts I would call it break in rather than burn in. The moving parts will, over a period of time, loosen so to speak - so I do believe in a running in period to overcome any stiffness in the cones etc. Some speaker manufacturers do recommend it to.

Burn in for cable - I'm sitting on the fence on this one - if it exists or not then fine but I'd rather use the time to listen to the music. In any event I've never thrown out a cable for getting worse over time (yet!).

or

'push off'

that is what you menat by the **** is it not!!

[Knox]

Yes !
yes !
yes !

Well it started with 'P' anyway !

Thanks for responding !

[Knox]

Burn in for headphones and speakers OK !

But burn in for cables I just can't swallow that !

My old man was an electronics engineer with BBC then channel '10' Queensland then NZ Broadcasting and would not countenance any such thing as burn-in of cables

As I was a Hi-Fi fanatic he grudgingly accepted my belief in burn-in for speakers and headphones because of the mechanics of these systems but would not agree in burn-in for cables or any electronic equipment

Maintaining that any electronic equipment would be burned in and ready to go in seconds !

[GBDG1]

Cables do "burn in" just that it takes a millionth of a second.

Cable merchants rely on metaphors to justify their position. If you imagine cables in a context such as roads or something else you could logically see how burn in would work. However, electricity and cable don't work like that at all. Definitely a false one.

Oh since I started this thread I got a pair of Ety Er6i's. They're only marginally better than the 3.99 jobbies. :D

if you're really interested in this cable stuff have a read here:

The cables debate evidence thread

[cribeiro]

There is actually something like "brain burn-in" involved.

It is a fact that our brain processes the sound and somehow "equalizes" it, so that our perception matches what we expect to hear.

After I re-discovered many great songs with my present equipment, I found I could hear many of the newly discovered details in the music even when playing through my car-audio kit

What my brain could not make up for was dynamics, though. Listening "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the radio few weeks ago was a nightmare, just as an example. I have also now my whole cd collection on a hard disk (extracted with EAC, stored in flac), and playing through the sound card shows a lot of compression as compared to the original, or when played in my Iaudio X5L.

Regards,

Alberto

[StevieDvd]

This agrees with my theory that A/B switching is a bit hit & miss. If your new 'better' equipment lets you hear detail that you had never heard before it is likely that your brain will now expect to hear it even with lower end equipment. This does not mean that the lower end gear is just as good, since without hearing the detail first your brain won't expect it. I tend to advocate for longer 'brain burn-in' periods with new equipment, then switch back to the old to see if it somehow falls short of what your brain is expecting. If not then the new stuff is not much (or any) better than the old - to your own ears that is, and that's what counts after all.

[cribeiro]

There is something important I forgot to add... AFAIK, there is an adaptation (acclimatation?) period when switching equipment, so that you do realize the difference in the few first minutes.

[kazino21]

Maybe the best way to check this would be if you bought a new pair of headphones/earphones, listened to them, let them run without listening to them for a good time and then listen to them in a few days after they've been playing for hours on end and see if they sound different, or you could buy another pair of the 4 quid HMVs and see if they sound different to your 'run in' ones?

[StevieDvd]

A lot of head-fiers do this as standrad practise anyway.

Normally I don't but one set of cans really did need a lot of running in and the difference to my ears from them straight out of the box and when run 24/7 for about 5 days was clearly auduble.

Remember with normal size headphones there are moving parts which eventually wear out so why is it so odd to expect this to affect the sound. It's like a new pair of leather shoes, stiff at first then loosens to a comfortable fit but eventually you'll replace them.

[russelkhan]

I didn't really believe in burn-in until I bought my Grado SR120. Out of the box the sound was pretty mediocre considering I'd just spent over £100. Compared to my Sennheiser HD600 they sounded muffled and lacking bite, and I'd read that these were bright-sounding phones! So I burned them in for 48 hours straight and the change was astounding!!! The upper frequencies really opened up, it was like a veil (well more like a curtain) had been removed. Incidentally, I still prefer the sound of the HD600, but the Grado's do come out once in a while when I fancy a change.