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Does Equipment Break In, or Does Our Hearing Adjust?

I’ve read many comments about how the sound quality of equipment improves after so many hours of use.  I don’t doubt what people are saying.

About a year ago, my wife and I were tired of not being able to hear dialog while watching TV.  Especially when there was background music or noise, we had a hard time hearing dialog.  Turning up the sound helped, but not very much.  The sound of the TV sounded normal to other people visiting us.

We bought a Zvox sound bar.  Setting it up, we could hear the dialog, but it sounded very tinny, almost irritating.  But that disadvantage was outweighed by being able to watch TV and hear what was being said.

Now, a year later, we can still hear the dialog, BUT, it doesn’t sound tinny anymore.  The voices sound normal, like people we talk to in real life.  It’s not irritating in the slightest.  This happened gradually over a year, so we didn’t notice it until we thought back to what it first sounded like.

My impression is that our hearing adjusted or became used to the new tinny sound.    Or, maybe the sound bar broke in to sound normal. But if it broke in to sound more like normal, I would have thought that it would lose the special effects that enabled us to hear it better.

Or even, maybe it was a bit of both?  Any thoughts?

128x128tcotruvo

Showing 1 response by mulveling

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
1,774 posts
 

Both, yes. Though for my part, I’ll say I’ve previously underestimated the effect of phycological / hearing adjustment. Over the years now I’ve had two of the same item (one old, one new) several times, which sometimes shows perceived "large" burn-in changes as illusory. Of course this is greatly complicated by the fact that some manufacturers DON’T produce the exact same quality item from unit to unit - even when they’re supposed to be the same version. And then there are products where the maker silently works in minor changes over time (no explicit version change). And then some products - like headphone pads - really do change their acoustics from wear & conditioning.

So I’ll just be satisfied with the fact that BOTH apply, but that actual large changes from burn-in are exceedingly rare.

I once had a guy install new output caps in a custom tube headphone amp. When I listened, it sounded like complete sh*t with no bass and most of the midrange missing. He said: `don’t worry, these caps just take a long time to break in! Get a few hundred hours on them.` Well I got fed up with that quickly, because it was truly unlistenable. So I cracked the amp open and see that he’d put the 0.47uF "bypass" cap in SERIES with the main cap. So even with 300 ohm headphones the high-pass rolloff effect was starting at something like 1 kHz. That’s my best example of "burn in mythos run wild".

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