My Sundaras were a bit underwhelming at first. So I ran a FryBaby into them for 5 days straight while I was away to California. Very noticeable difference when I got back. The change wan’t really tonal as much as it was openness; far more ambiance and spaciousness to the presentation.
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This is pretty much my experience, the difference isn’t tonal.
My Ether CX sounded very compressed out of the box, about the only headphones I’ve ever left playing for an extended period, they opened up a great deal over about a week.
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Only headphone I notice was on the Hedd. It didn’t have good bass until a week went by of listening for few hours per day and now it has slam. I have 10 headphones total but I haven’t put the recommended amount of time as I’m always jumping between cans.
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For me, this is an unequivocal “yes,” but I think it impacts some models more than others, and there are a number of factors. But I am not an expert, just an enthusiast, so I can only speak to my personal experience without any amount of science lol.
If the manufacturer recommends a burn-in period, I recommend always allowing it. My first entry into the planar magnetic field was a HifiMan 400s (not a great headphone, I’m aware, but again, it was one of my first that cost over $200). Now, HifiMan did recommend a break-in, but I figured, what the heck, I’ll play it first just to see how it sounded.
And it sounded TERRIBLE, so terrible that I decided if it would not improve after that break-in period, I would return them on the grounds of being defective. There was absolutely no bass, there seemed to be gaps in the mid-spectrum, and the highs were overtly tinny and flat. I plugged them into my iPod, set them on a shelf, and played some music for several days before trying them again. There was a marked difference, and I ended up keeping them for a couple years.
Based on that experience, my answer has to be a firm “yes” that break-in is real, because what I heard was absolute. The difference between before and after some break-in time was black and white. Whether it’s the pads (I can’t imagine pads making THAT much of a difference over the course of a few days, during which I hadn’t even worn them), drivers, housing, etc, I don’t know, but break-in is real.
I’ve since upgraded to an HE400i (Not a huge upgrade, but one day I’ll hopefully be able to drop some money on a nice pair), and for that model the difference was not very apparent, if there was a difference at all.
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This is always interesting for me. Yes, I do believe there is a certain about of burn in with headphones, but I find my brain also burns in as well. We have to listen to headphones for more than a few minutes to really be able to hear their characteristics. For me, that can translate to while I may not find a particular headset or speakers particularly interesting when I first hear it, I can grow to like it over time.
Of course, if I really want a critical view, I have my wife listen to it. Getting her opinion when I bought my home system, we, the store owners and I soon learned that her abilities were far more acute than my own.
So, I MIGHT have an extreme case of burn in. The Deva Pro I got a couple years ago sounded like complete arse…. I gave it a few hours of use and could NOT stand it. I’ll ignore the BT module because I plugged it in direct. But after a few month’s of occasional listening I let it collect in a corner and didn’t use it for ~2 years. Recently I found myself quiping about how horrible it is, so went and found it and plugged it in…….. and it wasn’t horrible? I don’t know the science or reason behind the drastically different experiences esp when putting them into obscurity was because of pure blandness. I know my hardware is different completely….. I guess I need to find the BT module and give it another listen. Could materials being fresh out the press mean they have different characteristics?
I own an Audioquest Nighthawk Carbon. The original NightHawk was polarizing upon its release, and considered extremely warm. (It’d probably be considered mainstream today.) When I first got the NHC, the biocellulose drivers seemed flabby and resembled the tonal properties of a rubber beach ball. It was okay back in the day, and I learned a lot about frequency response profiles from it.
I moved on to other products and let it sit. Several years later, I tried the NHC again. The drivers had firmed up and it sounded neutral or even brightish. I then concluded that “burn in” didn’t happen, but that biocellulose may be unstable and have a limited lifespan. It brings to mind how rubber or foam speaker surrounds tend to break down over time, and how paper cone drivers became brittle.
Burn in or age?
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Wow. Old thread. But I’ll bite. On the original question, no, I haven’t experienced burn-in, or if i have, I utterly failed to notice it. Which may or may not be poor auditory memory on my part. I remember being delighted with my 70s-era Stax’s when I got them but can I like as hell remember exactly what they sounded like? Nope. As I understand it (which is very imperfectly) human memory doesn’t work like that. But I was impressed as hell at the time. Putting them up against modern ‘phones with modern material science, etc? Not so much. But at that time … wow.
But physical changes to paper, foam speaker surrounds etc? Oh, yeah. Hell yeah. In fact, I’ve been looking for compatible and suitable drivers for a similarly elderly pair of IMF transmission line speakers for a while … though not looking super-hard, I might say.
So Ill assume burn-in specifically relates to changes over a short enough time scale for such physical changes to be ruled out as the cause, and it just being whatever is supposed to be burning in or loosening up, or what, doing so. in which case, I haven’t.
And again, wow, thread-resurrection. 
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I’ve experienced what could have been described as burn-in, but it turns out it was just pad wear. And I’d wager pad wear or some other kind of mechanical wear-in (like clamp force loosening) is responsible for nearly all reports of burn in to do with headphones where there is actually an acoustic cause - so not just down to placebo or high suggestibility. Keep in mind… manufacturers will often tell you to “burn it in”, and you can imagine the reasons as to why.
I say “nearly all reports”, meaning there are some edge cases where, as I’m led to believe, it is theoretically possible for there to be an acoustic change over time that’s not just due to pad or mechanical wear-in. But at this point the question is more to do with whether it’s a sufficient enough change to be audible or not, and you’ll also be dealing with the far more impactful variables of pad and mechanical wear.
This is of course an un-sexy answer - audiophiles love driver mythology, but for the stuff that’s perceptually relevant the vast majority of the time, it’s the mechanical stuff that’s making the difference. And the more you realize just how sensitive these devices are to the slightest positional variation, the more that makes sense.
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I have a Nighthawk Carbon and Nightowl myself, and I quite like them. They have a unique role – they can make you feel like a teenager again, listening to pop music at low volumes in the dark. (I’m actually not kidding, but of course they can be used for other things.)
The documentation that comes with the Nighthawk says it needs 100 hours for burn-in! Honestly that sounds like hogwash to me.
Can objects that move air to create sound do so differently as they age? Yeah, sure, no reason to doubt that, just as an old sail might catch the wind differently. But “burn-in,” as that term is typically used, suggesting that electronics only settles into its desired sound after x hours? Nah, I’m not a believer. The accommodation I sense when listening to something over time is all on the receiving end (between my ears). And, by the way, I think if anything the significance of our adjustment to a sound profile is understated. It is very, very, very significant.
A lot of Grado owners report that their headphones experience “burn in”. The Grado drivers are paper, whereas many others are mylar or metal.
I think I’ve experienced burn in with the Ultrasone Edition 8 EX. The sound changed quite a bit over the first 50 hours or so. Some change in pads likely played a role, but there may have been other factors as well. The reviews on the headphone all cited a change in sound over time.
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That doesn’t mean it was actually the driver ‘burn in’ causing these reports, if in fact they are genuine reports of acoustic change over time and not just people getting used to the sound. Again, pad wear is a massive variable, way more so than people realize - even just someone wearing the headphones and getting oils from hair or the side of the ear onto the pads can change the density of the coupling material, and this can have a surprisingly dramatic impact on the sound. And this isn’t just theoretical, I’ve seen it countless times with open box headphones. Swap the pads to fresh ones and then they match the FR you get with a brand new unit.
When it comes to drivers, those Grado drivers are fairly conventional, and I don’t believe there’s anything about the surface material that’s going to make a difference over time. You could run those drivers in free air for 100+ hours and they’d most likely show no difference compared to their behavior when fresh. And I should stress, those are fairly accessible drivers, so it’s something that could fairly easily be tested. However, with moving coil transducers in headphones specifically, they don’t have the spyder, which is where you’d see the kind of change take place with these types of drivers in speakers. This is something Jermo from Sennheiser has talks about here. So the traditional notion of “driver burn-in” isn’t a thing that typically applies in headphones, but the changes to acoustics as a result of mechanical wear-in absolutely occurs, and this is where the community has likely taken something from the speaker world and overreached in identifying the causes of acoustic change in headphones.
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Absolutely agree on the pads. I had Grado headphones, and the G pads literally hurt my ears. Changing to the F pads made the sound much more neutral. It also made the headphones hard to wear. I wound up moving on from the Grados, and now have a collection of HD 600, 650, and 660 S2, which to me are much more neutral. I don’t remember any break in with the Sennheiser headphones.
Watching the video now. Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
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I’ve definitely experienced changes with headphones that I knew for a fact were not run-in at the factory.
First, Ultimate Ears wanted to demonstrate how they could do a 1-day turn-around IEM creation from my digital ear impressions some years ago, using the UERR. When listening with them, they had near no bass response whatsoever until I’d played music through them for a few hours.
When I was a beta tester for the HE1000 V2, I received the beta set, and the bass was loose, boomy and clearly poor. Again, after some hours the bass tightened up. I’ve never had this experience with any new, regular pair of HiFiMan headphones since.
The Meze 109 Pro had a sharp and unpleasant treble out of the box, which only settled down after some hours. Meze told me that they don’t run in their headphones at the factory.
The Meze Rai Solo IEMs completely changed sound signature after some hours. I saw at least one reviewer do a quick review where his description of the sound matched my experience of them out of the box, and not after they had had some use.
My general impression thus far is that, very early on headphone drivers need a few hours before they will produce a consistent sound, meaning that how much DOA testing/run-in is done at the factory is important. Later on, pad wear can also change it as well.
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Break-in obvious and unremarkable with new cars – fresh shock absorbers are stiff, while new tires are soft and squishy. Engines and drivelines can run tight, whereby fuel economy improves over a year or two of use. One of our new cars was dramatically more responsive after 15,000 miles, and its fuel economy went up 5% to 10%. Some also believe you must drive fast when new if the car is to ever run fast (this is debated).
Headphone pads routinely squish flat and speaker surrounds can soften with use. The electromagnet system of a driver may or may not ‘entrain’ or settle into more predictable and consistent vibration/response cycles with use. I have no idea if this is measurable or audible, and I don’t hear changes with many things. Still, I don’t deny that some audio products do change. In my experience there’s no practical way to distinguish between pad flattening, possible magnetic refinement, or learning and habituation (aka brain burn).
Changes in the pads will result in changes in the frequency response. I’d have to dig them up, but Jude posted about the issues measuring a pair of HD600s or 650s showing how easily positioning and pad issues could affect a measurement. However, obvious distortion disappearing with time used is not something that is going to be pad-related. That’s just not possible. The only time any kind of measurement of a new pair of headphones was done was with a pair of AKG K701s by Tyll Hertsens back when Innerfidelity was running, and it showed a lower IMD over time. An ideal repeat of the experiment would be to do the same thing with a pair of headphones that has zero hours on the drivers from the factory, such as with the 109 Pros.