ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Hi all,
I assume that B&O speakers needs to be breaked in just like other brands. I just got a new BL19, and wonder how long it will take before it will perform at its optimum level? 20hrs? 150hrs?
Not much information on run in time on B&O online.
/Robert
Speaker break-in is an Audiofool myth. It has never been proven in a controlled measurement. It’s all psychological and you can take a brand new speaker along with an identical model with over a thousand hours on the clock and perform a level-controlled double-blind audition and no-one will be able to tell them apart. If the acoustics of your woofer are changing with time then the woofer is crap.
If break-in was true then all of the measurements and calibrations performed on brand new speakers as part of QA would be completely pointless.
I agree!
MM
There is a tv - and there is a BV
Aha, I thought that every moving part made out of rubber on speakers and pickups needed to breaked in. But the best is if it performs 100% straight out of the box.
Any other thoughts on this?
I also agree with BeoAnna.
If "break in" were a thing, then the calibration that we do at the end of production would be useless.
I tried once-upon-a-time to do a reasonably controlled experiment about this (not for publication or public release - just for my own curiosity) and proved (at least to myself) that, within the limits of the experiment that I did, the response of the drivers did not change significantly with "break in" of the moving components.
However, there are other places where something similar does occur, and might matter. One simple example is the leak in the seal of closed headphones at your jawline. In the case where the cushions or the covering is a little stiff, this leak will be bigger the first time you put on the headphones than it is after some time. This leak causes a change in the response of the headphones at the eardrum that might be big enough to be noticeable, although it will be a very small change on a day-to-day comparison, and we don't always wear headphones in EXACTLY the same position, which might make a bigger difference.
For loudspeakers, I've always thought that it's me, and not the loudspeakers that are breaking in. :-)
Cheers-geoff
Performance can indeed deteriorate with a LOT of time but we’re usually talking well over a decade and/or heavily abused speakers and/or storage in extremely harsh environments. But as far as a new speaker is concerned, nope, no difference. Any properly designed woofer is going to have exactly the same frequency response from date of manufacturing to a reasonable life expectancy under reasonable operating conditions.
But performance most certainly won’t get better with a properly designed speaker since the engineers would have engineered the speaker with a specific frequency response in mind and they’ll need it to perform consistently if they want to deliver their intended design to customers with consistency.
Plus as mentioned already speakers are often measured as part of the whole design to manufacturing to quality assurance process (at least you’d hope so). No good doing all those measurements if all it takes is a (few?) hundred hour(s) to change the operating characteristics of the speaker, that’s just way silly. Speaker break-in is just sales crappery to try and get customers to get used to crap speakers…
…and hopefully by the time the customer realises they’ve been handed over a turd the return window is well over :D
Thanks Geoff!
Case closed, I do not need to break in my new BL19
Just sit back, relax, and enjoy your new toy :D
You paid good money for it so it’s not unreasonable to expect the engineers to have done their thing.