Thoughts on Burn in #1

If you cruise around headphone forums enough you'll partake in many conversations about burn in. Burn in is the process of vibrating your driver with some sort of music such that the driver "breaks in" and achieves the original intended sound. Now, burn in is going to happen no matter what, it happens whenever you listen to music - this burn in I am referring to however, is the accelerated process. When I burn in a pair of headphones, I plug them into a source, play the music a little louder than I like to listen, and then leave them there for days. Currently I'm burning in my new JVCs (see the previous post) and the headphones are wrapped up in a polar fleece sock and inside a drawer to cut down on irritating noise. I use a variety of tracks for burn in including some white, pink, Brownian, and purple noise, sine wave sweeps, bass and drum heavy tracks, some solid classic rock, some classical, etc... I try to use the purpose built tracks as well as some regular listening music in a rotation to give the drivers a full work out. You will hear plenty of people say that they don't believe in burn in... Personally I am on the fence. Burn in theoretically has no negative impact so I just do it on the off chance that it will really improve sound quality. I do have a burn in example however that gives me at least some faith that increased playing time does equate to improved sound quality. I got myself and my wife a pair of PX 100s way back in the day at the same time. I used my constantly and occasionally burned them in. My wife, well, she used hers pretty minimally. Today, the headphones do not sound the same. And in my opinion, my pair sound rounder, fuller, and richer - basically I just feel like I get more out of them than she gets out of hers - more music that is. So anyways, these new JVCs are going to burn in for about 150 hours before they go off with me to Finland. Supposedly, that is about half the burn in time necessary for these to really grow and come into their own. But, last night, after writing that post, I listened to a few albums as I cleaned up the apartment and every track was a pleasant surprise. These are really good sounding headphones. Good enough that I am now looking at some of the JVC iem choices, naturally all Japanese imports!