You claim my methods are unscientific but you try to disprove a theory by doing unscientific tests yourself and claim otherwise ? LP
Its not just one earphone, i've been using a myriad of earphones which audiophiles like you shun. you audiophiles only tell about high end earphones, whereas people like me use the budget earphones available to everyone. If you want a list of earphones/headphones which i've used for some time, they're panasonic, philips, sony, cowon, soundmagic, & some unknown chinese brands which you get locally for 40 bucks.
First off I am no audiophile. My collection of earphones are mostly in the 2k to 3k bracket which is a far cry from the top tier stuff that real audiophiles use.
All of these sound exactly the same as they did from when they were taken outside the box. Getting some funky sound from an expensive model and supposedly burning it and not getting that sound again, means you have experienced some type of placebo effect in you. Just because you get a headache and it goes away after running the earphone for 40 hours means nothing. It has no scientific basis to it. All your proof comes from what you thought you felt. No offense to you mate.
Similarly, the converse can be held true to me since my opinion comes from all the proof i heard.
By using your logic, if I fish in the sea and catch a fish I can conclude that fish do exist. If you fish in the sea and catch nothing then do you conclude that there are no fish in the sea ?
Most reviewers I trust also have come to the same conclusions, some earphones that we have both tested show burn-in and some (again that we all tested) did not show any changes to the sound after burn-in. Mass placebo perhaps ???
I have 6 earphones with me right now - Idance X202 and X104, Head-direct RE1, Brainwavz M3, RHA Audio m350i and Brainwavz Beta Pro,
Of the 6, only the Beta Pro showed some changes in SQ after burn-in but it wasn't very different from stock. The other 5 sounded the same after burning them for hours and hours or its possible the differences were too slight for me to distinguish.
So the percentage of headphones that have changed after burnin is very small.
The Signature Acoustic earphones I received sounded horrible out of the box and I even remarked to my friend that I couldn't bear to listen to it during the initial period. However now they are one of my favourite earphones. It must be some strong placebo effect to make a hated earphone transform into one of my favourites.
I've read on some manufacturer's site that drivers always perform to their best from when they're factory fitted. Each speaker is always tested for all sound frequencies, and running them for 100 hours or so wont loosen or tighten them or give any changes in sound coming from them. If this (burnin) was actually true, why dont the manufacturer's themselves burnin the speakers before selling them?I mean everyone would like their speakers to sound better than the competition, right?
Technology now has advanced as much to put a full range of audio signals through speakers so as to loosen the drivers in all frequencies. They could run the speaker through the full spectrum from 0-25 Khz for just 1/2 - 1 hour. It would produce more results than if you played the same song for days since the song only has limited frequencies encoded in it.
Are you so niaeve to believe that a Chinese earphone manufacturer selling millions of earphones actually bothers to test each earphone for burn-in ? I would not be surprised if there wasn't even a customary DOA check to see if the earphones worked or not with many Chinese manufacturers.
Only better companies like Etymotic ears or AKG or Sennheiser might bother testing each earphone.
I trust my ears and I have had 2 earphones from the same manufacturer and one was burned in and one wasn't. (Hippo VB). My friends copy was brand new and mine was almost a year old. His copy was noticeably more sibilant than mine and I could easily tell the difference.
If you believe that all manufacturers test and burn in earphones including the cheaper ones you use then fine.
These aren't scientific tests a of course but I believe my ears and common sense tells me that if 10s of other reviewers also agree with me that one earphone experiences burn-in while another model does not I am more inclined to believe that than someone who uses a few earphones and comes to the conclusion that they sound the same after usage and hence the burn-in phenomenon doesn't exist !!!
Mind you burn-in isnt going to make a $10 earphone suddenly compete with a $100 earphone. Its a subtle but audible difference. Bass tightening, treble smoothing etc. If you don't have a ear for such differences you will not be able to tell any difference.
Lastly have a look at this and come to your own conclusions -
http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/evidence-headphone-break
This is one headphone that tons of people have commented that they experienced changes in the sound after burn-in. All of them must be like me suffering from mass placebo effect.