Headphone News

One myth a lot of headphone users hold particularly dear is that of burn-in. The idea is that your headphones sound less than ideal straight out of the box. What you have to do is play100-200 hours of music, which gets the headphones' innards to loosen up.

The problem with this is that, while burn-in is a very widely held belief that isn't limited to headphones, there really is no proof of its existence or nonexistence.

What we're going to do, starting right this very second, is run a battery of audio tests on the headphones fresh out of the box, and then after getting burned in for at least 100 hours (we'll note the total time the headphones were burned in; sometimes we'll need to ship the headphones back before the 200 hour mark). We will be using different genres of music each time we do the burn-in, and we'll try to get in multiple copies of the headphones so we can test with different genres of music to see if the effects are different.

If you have any suggestions on different stuff we can do with this experiment, email us!

UPDATE - 7/8/09: 
We're still running the tests, so we can have a decent collection of data available. We'll be noting the exact time the headphones have burned in, and the type of audio used to burn them in. Unfortunately, we've had to return many sets of headphones before they would've had time to adequately burn-in, so this saga is unfortunately still ongoing. 

Also, to clarify, we're testing based on our current battery of tests. This unfortunately doesn't extend to all the wonderful subjective qualities of headphones. 

UPDATE - 8/18/09:
We're still collecting data and whatnot, but since the economy has whisked 90% of staff time to other projects, this experiment is on hiatus for a bit. When this is updated, it'll be in a new blog post that we'll link from here.

[Bad Photoshop courtesy of images from HeadRoom and chuckbauman.com]