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. 

Now, what is burning in? Burning in is really just a process by which a listener lets the headphones play for a period of seven to eight hours, sometimes even several days at a time. This allows the diaphragms in the speakers to loosen up, enabling the headphones to perform at their peak level.

Burning in headphones can be done in different ways, but you’ll invariably find that each audiophile has their own practice. I tend to just leave my brand-new headphones on at about 70% volume overnight for seven to eight hours. When I pick them up in the morning, they can sound a lot nicer than they did the night before.

Some audiophiles push this process to 80 hours, 100 hours, or even 400 hours before they feel the headphones sound at their peak performance level. The key thing to know about burning in is that as long as the headphones benefit from the loosening of the diaphragms, you should give them at least a few hours before judging the sound quality of a brand-new pair.

There are exceptions, though. Some headphones use different driver technologies, like balanced armature drivers, planar magnetic drivers, or electrostatic drivers, that don’t necessarily benefit from burning in. However, in my experience, anything that uses a moving coil diaphragm—in other words, a dynamic driver—needs burning in for sure. This is because the diaphragm has a certain amount of stiffness due to the way it was assembled 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.