I recently purchased Energy brand speakers. The manual suggests that before attempting to tune them in that you should play for the first 100 hours a full range music C.D. This insures that the transducers have time to loosen up before attempting to get optimal performance from your speakers, also they should not be played at high volume levels during this time.

Is this advice worth following? What kind of C.D. should I purchase that covers a full musical range? What db level would be considered high volume?

I have purchased other speakers and have never read this suggestion in a manual any help would be appreciated thank you.

All decent speakers sound better after a break in period. Dont know of a specific CD though. I would say a good rule would be no hip hop.

[Link: shop.monitoraudio.co.uk]

I'm a dealer but I haven't tried it yet.

Looks like snake oil. I'd say just a good CD where real instruments are used. Something like Jazz at the Pawn Shop

Back in my early a/v days I worked for an audiophile shop and they had a disc that ran the gamut from 20hz to 20k over and over and over again. I had to listen to speakers break in while I soldered audio wires all day long. Damn was I happy when I had to run errands...

When I sober up I will look for thee disc, I do not remember the name. It is not something that will hurt the speakers. And it is a great way to annoy anyone who is in listening distance.

There were many test discs with the break-in track.

The Stereophile disc's track had clanging like pots and pans with a backgroud that sounded like frequency sweeps going up and down.

Another old trick is to intentionally wire one speaker out of phase, and place the speakers face to face.

This way the racket is reduced significantly as they cancel each other out, and you can leave them going in a spare room for a few days to get some hours on them.

This was I was taught as well.

Speakers do 'break in' but the difference between the 'broken in' sound and new is very little and barely if at all audible. The 'Break in' happens very quickly in the first several hours of play. If you do not like the sound new then your opinion is not going to change when 'broken in'. The difference is not much.

Manufacturers' tell you a 100 hours because it gives you time to get used to their speakers compared to whatever speakers you were previously listening. This is partially snake oil. If it doesn't sound good from the start you migh get used to them and not return them. The flip side of the coin is people do get used to a certain sound and might not realize the new speaker is better until they start to get used to it.

The actual 'break in' happens very quickly and the difference is very minor. The rest is psychoacoustics and marketing.

Bob

I thought that too until I heard a brand new speaker next to a speaker that was broken in. If you can barely tell the difference you are using some poor quality speakers.


Completly wrong. Again, try some good speakers

hahaha.... They tell you 100 hours because by that time you cannot take them back for a refund!!!!

Fins nailed it. Break in is real and if you dont believe there is a major difference then I challenge you to pick up 2 pair of Terra, Mordaunt Short or Totem speakers and break one pair in before comparison. You will hear a HUGE difference.

Like White said... I was a non-believer until I became a Totem dealer.

I had a pair of Forests for quite some time before becoming a dealer. They have over 200 hours on them, and I absolutely love 'em.

I pulled a new pair of Forests out of their boxes for a demo to a client... and even though I used the same room, same placement, and same head-end gear - I stood there scratching my head while thinking "WTF"?

Break-in periods are real, and required. Period.

Add Snell to that list. Talk about being tight when new. But after breaking in, the sound is incredible.

I'll admit I haven't read the entire thread, but...

Roddy, if that disc had all tones at the same level, then it wasn't right. Back before hip-hop, it was generally noticeable that music tended to decrease in level by about three dB per octave. A sound that reproduces this, randomly, is pink noise. If the levels were all the same, as in white noise, then either the system got less bass than it normally would with music, or more treble than normal. Either way, though, it probably helped (unless you blew the tweeters!).

I'd suggest to the original poster that the noise on an FM tuner between stations, with the treble turned down a little, will do just fine. And it has the advantage of being a slight bit less tiring than the sound Roddy was talking about. When breaking in speakers, it's sort of like the sound of breaking waves at the ocean. Fifteen foot waves. And you're standing where the water is four feet deep.

I agree whole heartedly. Totems sound much better after break-in