Help with headphone break in
Reply #25 – 2013-04-18 22:20:09
No, what he's referring to is standard practice for equipment that must not fail (e.g. military). All components and the resulting assembly suffer from what's called infant-mortality, whereby new equipment can suffer early failure. Once past a certain threshhold, equipment that didn't fail is likely to be highly reliable for a long (and usually predictable) time. Critical equipment will be taken out of service before it's time-expired. This doesn't only apply to electronic gear, things like jet-engines are treated similarly. Those practices, and strict quality control in general, are required in fields like military, medical, avionics, automotive and the like, where failing devices could cause catastrophic results like death, injuries or economic loss or in fields like scientific or research labs where the customer is very competent and could sue the seller if the device acts out of specifications. And they do have a cost! DVDdoug, how much of the production cost (not selling price) of the device your company produce is due to QC (burn-in, factory calibration etc...)? With audio gears we are in a completely different field: none will be actually harmed by a deviation of some percent of distortion, plus audiophiles often are technically very incompetent people who believe in magic and kitchen table tweaks to improve engineering choices and companies try to minimize production costs, no matter how disproportionately high they will charge their customers: that's business! A certain rate of warranty repairs or even rejects are far cheaper than a systematic aging procedure and higher rate production scraps. That said, personally I've never experienced performance variations that can be consistently related to any burn-in effect and don't believe this could happen in just properly designed electronics, not after a few hundred working hours and not as an improvement, for sure. I only keep an open mind for transducers where mechanics is involved (and for the reasons above).