Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions speaker break-in music

thanks for the replies!! i have non axioms remember (dont hurt me)the Energy RC-70 and they say 100 hours of break-in which seems like a lot! I thought classical was the way to go as well and i'll do that.....with some exorcism music backwards around the 90 hour mark!! :P

If you have (and I am abso. sure Axiom does) a good manufacturing process with a good SPC process, failures as you described it would be rare. But they do happen.

I am betting for most people online speaker shopping is still a bit scary. If a speaker shows up not preforming properly at a customer, they may just pack the thing back up and ship it back, not even realizing it was defective. Because there is no store to take them back to and a duel listening session with a sales person or technician, the product has to work perfectly everytime. This must be critical to Axiom's business model (along with the excellent customer support they offer).

That's a good point. Subwoofers with DSPs would be more prone because of the circuit boards, though.

Hi Infamous1,

That's hilarious--100 hours of break-in! I'm surprised that Energy perpetuates such nonsense, but Energy/Mirage/Athena are all part of Klipsch now, so perhaps such peculiar advice emanated from the Klipsch division.

I say "peculiar," because, as previous posts have indicated, the only break-in that occurs is a psycho-acoustic phenomenon, in which your ear/brain/hearing system accommodates the sound of new reproducers in your particular room.

What's also interesting about such recommendations is that all the research on this, which in my view is definitive, took place in Canada at the National Research Council in Ottawa, where Axiom, PSB, Paradigm and Energy/Mirage guys all did tests and measurements. We kept a supply of "anchor" loudspeakers there for years, including Axioms, Energy, Mirage, KEF, PSB, Paradigms, etc., all of which were regularly placed into the double-blind listening tests along with new speakers being reviewed and measured for magazines. The accumulated data on the speakers kept at the NRC showed that the speaker frequency responses of our "sonic anchors" did not change at all over the years, and that, in the blind listening comparisons, the same speakers garnered the same rankings from different groups of listeners.

As one previous post mentioned, if the motor assembly, spider, the elasticity of the surround material, cone and dome materials actually "broke in", then with prolonged use, it would continue to change and age over time, causing easily measurable changes in frequency response, some of which would no doubt be audible.

But the speakers didn't change over time and many hours of listening tests over years. And the rankings of the same speakers also were remarkably consistent from one year to the next. A speaker that measured and sounded excellent out of the box continued to yield the same curves and rankings for years, sometimes ten years or more. If a speaker sounded good, it continued to do so for years; the bad speakers also measured and sounded just as bad years later. They didn't change or improve. We kept some really wonky speakers around as well so there would always be a scale of bad to excellent that we could always include in any round of speaker testing.

Everyone who did work at the NRC knew this. I suspect Energy is just perpetuating some of the dearly held high-end myths about speaker "break-in" so as not to offend reviewers or editors who, lacking the data, actually buy into this myth.

Regards,

Alan

Thanks Alan for your input..

yes thank you! i've been afraid to play them at any sort of decent level because I wasn't close to 10 hours let alone 100.

Let them babies rip

Crank them up, I want to hear them all the way over here!

Here's my favorite break-in method.

1. Find some mono program material. Old Beatles recordings work well.
2. Connect your speakers out-of phase (i.e. connect the wire backwards on the back of one of your speakers).
3. Put your speakers face to face so there is less than 6" of space between their fronts.
4. Get a heavy blanket and drape it over the speakers. This will muffle the sound that leaks out while they're playing.
5. Turn on your equipment, insert CD, turn up the volume all the way, and hit play with endless repeat.
6. Now leave the room immediately and let the music continue for 30 days or the duration of your money back guarantee, whichever is shorter.

Because the music is in mono and the speakers are out-of-phase and facing each other, you should actually hear very little sound even though the speaker drivers will be moving quite a lot. And who would want to hear the sound from un-broken-in speakers??

I figure if you do believe in break-in, you should go all out.


Did I mention I'm a non-believer?

There is also a 28-day version to be February-compatible.