LOL. If this were a court case the anecdotal "I heard it, it must be true" findings would be laughed at. The case would be thrown out for an overwhelming lack of reliable evidence and Stehno would be fined for wasting the courts time.
Lol
...No such things in audio discussions/forums. No one is going to jail, no one is getting a fine to express his personal judicial/fundamental/experienced/subjective/scientific/physical/mathematical/electronic/objective/social/moral/audio/economical/musical opinion. :b
Anyway it was an excellent reply because many times we interpret from our own perception and belief what others hear and not hear.
It is the same with words without pictures/gestures/intonations that we read on our screens. :b
And that, was a realistic and logical and intelligent reply. And the time and effort he took to express it in words as the best he can is not everyone's given.
Many times I would like to take that time to explain myself more clearly but I don't make the effort to take that time to better communicate, and that, is often a downfall in our audio discussions.
You brought yourself few good points to the discussion, and without mentioning them it wouldn't have been that informative, maybe, in that advancing subject.
So you are deserving kudos as well.
________
* I don't have a degree in audio burn-in science; its effects over time @ different periods, and for each piece of electronic audio gear including the loudspeakers and speaker wires and interconnects...analog/digital, and the type of connection (USB, HDMI, opt, coax, balanced analog, unbalanced, ...) and with all the various AC power chords, external power supplies, DACs burn-in, DSP chips, crossovers, ...a million miles of electronic circuit boards and parts.
Say you play an album on your turntable; how many times do you have to spin that same album till it reaches the perfect audio readiness/burn-in time?
Is the needle tracking the grooves needs a certain amount of time to be optimal, the phono preamp, the four tiny wires tunneling inside the tonearm, the phono interconnects, etc., etc., etc.? Where do we start and stop?
Everything is different, even the time we listen to the same music from the same system twice, and in particular from analog LPs.
But those tiny differences are mostly insignificant to the point of having no valid effect on our perception of music reproduction.
The burn-in factor's main significance is from accurate measurements @ different intervals in time. And even then they'll be mostly minuscule.
D'accord, few audio products do require burn-in time for some parts to reach their optimal potential...say from five minutes to five months...depending.
No doubt that objective measurements are not the end of all ends because of many factors affecting those measurement machines...even the measurement tools most likely need their own burn-in to accurately graph what audio signals they get with less than perfect voltages from our electricity grids.
Where you connect the measurement oscilloscopes, etc., and the AC power chord used to connect them, that too have their slight variables of importance.
Without defining all the components comprising a system, and where that system is; we are floating above mid-air in audio waves.
Even our ears are influenced by burn-in time. ...Time of the day/night, how many hours, etc.
The acoustics of the room from various materials; with time those materials would have an auditory transformation from expansion and compression...from humidity, dryness, temperature.
How much burn-in is required before humans reach their optimal performance potential? I know, it has nothing to do with electronics, only with experimental variables from other pieces of gear connected in sync with the audio electronic component under burn-in test. But it is us the humans with our ears who perceive slight transformations in sounds. And they are as hard to define as the number of sand particles on the beaches of Rio.
How much of bun-in/break-in is measurable objectively in comparison to the sounds we hear? The ear is our best measurable tool in audio, and time is different each second after the next previous one.
To me burn-in is EQuing, acoustically treating, measuring, re-measuring, listening, and more listening.
I will wait three months before I can make a fair assessment of what I am hearing from my system. Before that the music is not playing @ its full potential; the speaker drivers, the crossover parts, the wiring in the circuit boards, the resistors, capacitors, transistors, coils, transformers, copper and silver and gold chemical compositions with the internal and external temperature, the filaments in the tubes, the foil paper, the driver's materials, the rubber surrounds, ...with micron value differences over time might have a psychological influence over our hearing.
Science is all we only have to be most assured of our senses and how we interpret with them.
Plus in audio/music, the emotional level we get from each recording and @ different times when our moods are constantly changing, is impossible to measure with total accuracy and definition...simply impossible. So it's only us, what we feel from our hearing that is the true essence. And the amount of burn-in effect it has on that essence is relative to each piece of electronic audio gear with time measured intervals, or not.
There is no doubt that 'some' audio components measured very different from the first time they are measured and from another time much later on.
It can even be dramatic. In those cases, our human hearing is good enough to notice.
•
http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/breakin.html
"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein.
•
http://www.audioholics.com/loudspeaker-design/speaker-break-in-fact-or-fiction
•
http://www.ecoustics.com/electronics/forum/home-audio/173455.html
•
http://www.stereophile.com/content/breaking-new-speakers-4
•
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=86387.100
•
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/parts/81355-capacitor-burn-break.html
•
http://www.tested.com/tech/accessories/459117-science-and-myth-burning-headphones/
•
http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/forums/physics.9/
?
http://www.audiologyonline.com/articles/subjective-and-objective-measures-hearing-891
•
http://www.audioholics.com/audio-video-cables/audio-cable-break-in-science-or-psychological