Beginner's Guide

Why you should burn in your brand new Headphones?

If you bought yourself a brand-new headphones, you should know they can sound very ordinary straight out of the box. It doesn't sound particularly great but give them a few hours of playtime, and now it's a whole new world. It can sound much nicer, and why does this happen? This is happening because of a process that audiophiles like to call burning in.

Intro

Hi guys this is Raghav here from headphone Zone. If you bought yourself a brand new headphone the thing you should know is that they can sound very very ordinary straight out of the box. It doesn't sound particularly great at all but give them a few hours of play time and now it's a whole new world. It can sound much nicer and why does this happen? This is happening because of a process that audiophiles like to call burning in. 

Burn In for Headphones 

Now what is burning in? Burning in is really just a process by which a listener lets these headphones play for a period of seven to eight hours maybe sometimes several days at a time and it allows the diaphragms in your speakers to just loosen up and the headphones perform at their peak performance level. Burning In the headphone can be done different ways but you'll invariably find that each audiophile has its own practice. I tend to just leave my brand new headphones on at about 70% volume overnight for seven to eight hours and when I pick them up in the morning they can sound a lot nicer than what I had left behind in the night. Some audiophiles can push this to 80 hours, 100 hours and even 400 hours before they think the headphones sound at that peak performance level. The thing you should know with burning in is that as long as the headphones benefit from loosening up of the diaphragms you should give them at least a few hours before you start judging a brand new headphones sound quality. There are exceptions though, there will be some headphones that use different driver technologies like balanced armature drivers, planar magnetic drivers or electrostatic drivers that don't necessarily benefit from burning in but in my experience anything that uses a moving coil diaphragm or in other words a dynamic driver needs burning in for sure only and only because the diaphragm has a certain amount of stiffness because of the way that it's been put together in the factory.

Outro

 So that's some interesting trivia for you to try out. If you've got a brand new headphone, burn them in and leave us a comment in the comment section telling us if you heard a difference.