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
