Speaker Break-In - What Physically Changes During Break-In To Enable Better Sound?

It all depends on design. Big motors and acoustic suspension will dominate response on high quality drivers - spider and surround compliance being negligible. On low quality drivers then you can fully expect the manufacturer to recommend a break in period - this is because the response of poor quality cheap drivers will be affected by minor things like spider and surround.

On high quality speakers the drivers should be ALREADY broken in by extreme stress testing like in these two test examples (especially watch the second test on a small driver which is totally extreme)

https://youtu.be/ZEBICv7QPDM

The following video shows how drivers are built and individually tested from the ground up.

https://youtu.be/HJHul8HgbPs


Many speaker manufacturers are simply using mass produced OEM parts often they don’t even run multiple tests except a go no go (it works or it doesn’t). Mass produced parts produced for a large market of speaker builders are designed to be easy to build and reliable with low reject rates. This means performance and tolerances are much looser with design considerations weighted towards reliability and ease of manufacture rather than pure performance. These speaker manufacturers may indeed recommend break in as parts may not have settled thermally and mechanically....having never been tested thoroughly until you receive your speaker.

Caps should be reformed before you receive them if the speaker maker chooses such caps that require it. Otherwise this is not high quality production. High quality designs will also avoid passive crossovers for a multitude of obvious reasons.

Capacitors don’t have windings. You are thinking of transformers.

The choice of “fancy” crossover parts in a speaker with cheap OEM drivers is the oldest marketing game in the book. Of course OEM speaker manufacturers dwell on this because the box and the crossover are often the only things designed by the manufacturer, the rest being assembly of OEM parts. Again design choices can be made to build to tight overall reliable tolerances or driven by marketing claims by installing fancy stuff between ho-hum drivers.

@audiozen

Replace the words “high end” in your post with “low end” and you are right. Only crap low quality speakers have a high risk of “off center piston” misalignment. High quality speakers made of high quality parts are not only built with far higher precision, they are rigorously tested far more extremely than you could ever expect at home.

Please take a look at my previous post with videos demonstrating the type of testing done by serious speaker manufacturers (of which there are a few).

Once again requirements for an extended “break in” is simply an excuse by marketing and sales staff for crap quality products. Products that vary audibly from one production model to the next right from the get go. Also if a product is still drifting audibly in performance after 60 hours then it just speaks to the terrible sloppy build quality - likely this sloppy wide tolerance type build will never settle properly even after 1000 hours and just continue to sound worse gradually with time (poorly aligned parts don’t magically cure themselves).

@kosst_amojan

Did you watch the videos?

You might learn something if you did.

Not all speakers are just thrown together using OEM parts and go out the door with only a go no go test. Some drivers are rigorously built and stress tested individually (extreme amplitude response as well as thermal) and tested against an “ideal response” reference and tested again together in the final assembly. These speakers are already broken in when you receive them. Drift over the life of these speakers is negligible due to the entirely different design philosophy to other manufacturers. We are talking true reference type speakers (with commensurately costly manufacture process) even if the word “reference” is way over used to market nearly every speaker.

True reference is not a “silly” concept it is however expensive and very few speakers are built to such a high standard and this is why many low quality manufacturers will warn you that their device needs to settle and break in at your home for up to hundreds of hours.

@audiozen 

No worries. The videos I linked to are about ATC testing process. I know ATC are delighted that most manufacturers use mass produced OEM Seas drivers. ATC would not have an enjoyable niche producing higher quality parts in house for higher quality speakers if every speaker manufacturer built to such high standards. It is a good thing that other manufactures believe in using cheaper parts and telling their customers to expect significant audible break-in. In a way, you are supporting a tiered speaker market which keeps everyone happy.

@audiozen 

This is a speaker forum not a car forum. There are actually no pistons in a speaker. I hope this makes sense.