Do headphones need burn in?
Do headphones need burn in? This was the exact thought doing rounds in my head, when I bought Sennheiser HD 201 headphones, couple of months back.
Initially I decided to follow Anup sir’s advice and started using the headphones, without going through the burn in process. However I wasn’t quite impressed by the ability of HD 201’s in the bass department, even though it was far better than my previous headphones. Add to this, I began noticing subtle but gradual improvement in sound quality of the headphones, as I kept on using them, leading me to suspect, that there was still quite a bit of potential left in these headphones and a little bit of burn in with pink noise would probably be a good idea.
By now I guess I had already used the headphones for 20 hours or more, so I felt I needn’t go through a lengthy burn in process, especially since I would still be using them for movies and music during the burn in period, as I was in no mood to keep my computer on throughout the night to finish the burn in process in a hurry.
After a few hours worth of burn in with pink noise and also a few more hours worth of watching movies, I decided to add white noise to the mix as well and alternated between pink and white noise and went through another 3-4 hours worth of burn in process.
Although I can not scientifically corroborate anything and neither do I claim to be an audiophile, however I did notice that pink noise didn’t managed to bring out bass as much as the combination of pink and white noise did (or maybe it was the white noise alone).
After roughly 50 hours or so of burn in process and listening to the usual things, I felt that headphones were producing sound distinctly better than earlier with bass reproduction going up steadily and shrillness which existed quite a bit earlier, was gone from vast majority of the tracks and headphones’ had transformed from mainly treble oriented to being much more focused upon the entire soundstage with slightly more emphasis on treble.
While I am quite sure, that had I kept on going with the normal usage, HD 201’s would have probably ended up with similar sound stage and quality, however, the burning process did speed up that process by around 20% and may or may not have had a positive impact. So at least as far as I am concerned, I know which side of the divide I now stand and would definitely be burning in the next set of headphones I buy.
