> You mean if I hear someone scratch a blackboard
> enough times I would get used to the sound or it
> would change because my perception of it would
> be different? I don't buy that one bit.
I'm not sure that something painful makes for a good analogy here. It's very difficult to ignore pain.
For those of you that wear glasses, perhaps you had an experience like I did: I hadn't been to the eye doctor in a while, and when I received a new set of glasses with a stronger perscription, I at first thought that they were "broken" or simply not the right ones for me. Because of the way the new perscription bends light, the world literally seemed to be warped. I told my eye doctor, and he assured me that the perscription was fine and I should give it a couple of days. Sure enough, after wearing the new glasses for a full day, the "world settled back to normal". Of course, my glasses didn't need to break in, it just took a while for my brain to adjust.
If speakers really do sound significantly different after breaking in, and companies claim that matching broken in speakers for superior sound is important, then it should be pretty easy to provide some empircal evidence, yes?
Until then, I think it's pretty reasonable to believe that this is a myth. In fact, I would suggest that it's our responsibility to believe that it is a myth until we see empirical evidence.
In a free market, customers get the products that they deserve. If we all allow ourselves to believe that sonic improvements can be found in interconnects made during a full moon, and lucky rabit feet volume control knobs, then we're going to get just that.
