Speaker Burn-In: getting it wrong

Speakers are kind of like a pair of new shoes. This video is not for everybody. But I ran it last year and then decided I was wrong.

The trouble is, like most things, it’s not always so simple. And there was some good information and process mixed with the questionable stuff. Now I’ve learned on here that most of you aren’t going to watch a long video, but a couple of you are.

And so this is for you. First the original and then the rebuttal. And then finally we can talk about how all this has aged me.

Do you need to break in new speakers? Maybe. Speakers are kind of like a pair of new shoes.

Their components may need to be exercised a little bit. And because it’s probably not a great idea to flex them with your fingers, we like to set them up and run some sound through them. What frequency?

All of them. The trouble is, listening to white noise, it’s only slightly better than listening to bagpipes for the hangover. And even if you set it up yourself and go away for the weekend, your neighbors are not going to appreciate 12 or 24 hours of it while you break your speakers in.

Instead, run white noise into each channel, invert the phase on one of them, point them at each other, and tell your neighbors to thank Beat Kitchen. And as for does it really work? I don’t know.

I’ve always done it and my speakers sound great. Maybe this is a correlation causation issue. I might also explain why there are no tigers in my studio.

So we’re here to talk about speaker burners. Everybody, this is Nate Baglios from Cali. And a very funny thing happened, which is that I posted this thing about speaker burners.

And I got a text from Nate. You’re wrong. Which I love.

Usually when people tell me that I’m wrong, it comes with a whole bunch of bad words. Nate, he was like, “This is a really fun topic. Do you want to talk about it?” And I said, “Yeah, let’s go.

You and me right now.” Dude, I’m in Seoul, Korea right now. And it’s the middle of some part of the day. And to which I was like, “Oh.” And then he wrote me back.

He was like, “All right.” So here he is. I knew you couldn’t resist. Thank you for waking up and doing this.

So what did I get wrong? What you said is, I don’t know if this works, but I do it all the time anyway. From what we know, it’s BS.

It’s a marketing tactic. It doesn’t work. But it’s really interesting BS.

So where that data comes from our standpoint is we do, on all of our speakers as part of development, a power test. Which is, we play the speakers at full tilt for 100 hours. Which is, it’s best practice that we got from when we were at JBL.

And JBL’s power test room, if they’re doing really powerful speakers, they’ll tell the security guards, “Hey, have all the fire extinguishers on hand, because we’re running power tests on 100 hours on these super high powered speakers.” And I’m guessing it’s really loud. Yeah, it’s really loud. When you’re talking about, in the JBL power test room, you’re only allowed to be in there for five minutes a day if they’re running full power tests.

You have to have two layers of air protection in. And if they’re doing subwoofers, if you stand where those waves are all coming together, it’s, yeah, it’s horrendously powerful. And you’re talking about SPL levels at 140 or more.

But it’s a really good practice, because it tells you where the speaker could potentially fail. And it also shows you, like, “Hey, if you play this too loud for too long, the speaker’s gonna catch on fire.” Which is obviously something we always want to avoid. That’s bad.

Yeah, it’s generally bad if the speaker catches on fire. We do the same thing at Cali, and what doing that allows is, we can take a speaker that is brand new, just was assembled, all the components are brand new, and compare it to a speaker that has gone through 100 hours of as much power as it can handle continuously. And compare the performance between those two speakers.

And it’s usually, unless the speaker design is pretty flawed and you burn something during a power test, the differences are, and specifically the difference in frequency response, you’re gonna get more of a difference between a speaker that was made in the beginning of the day and the end of the day, versus a speaker that has gone through power tests and a speaker that has not gone through power tests. So can I interrupt you? Let me ask you.

Can you identify any consistent difference that exists? Do they tend to change in the upper frequencies rather than the lower frequencies? Or is it just, or nobody knows?

Yeah, it’s all over the place, depending on the speaker design itself. It will be consistent within the upper model range, but the difference is so minute. I would assert that it is impossible to hear the difference from my own experience, anecdotally.

I would assert, more importantly, you’re gonna have more of a difference depending on the temperature in your room, versus your speaker being broken in or not. Which is to say that the difference is really negligible. So what’s interesting to me about this is, it’s something that’s been around in the ether for a while.

You have to power test your speakers, and there are, in some speakers’ user’s manuals, there are specific recommendations for how to do the power test, what to play, for how much time, and basically saying, “These are not up to spec until you’ve done this process.” And so, I don’t know this for sure. This is gonna sound slightly conspiratorial. But what I expect…

You get a new pair of speakers, and you set them up in your room, and if you’re good at your job as a producer or a music maker, it’s gonna be jarring, because it is pretty easy to get used to the sound of a pair of speakers in a room. And a good musician and a good producer, even if the frequency response that they’re hearing is not necessarily flat, they will learn to adjust to that, and they will start to hear that sound in that room as being neutral. I’m trying to interrupt you, but I have to say, one of the things I’ve told my students for years and years is, the story of when I upgraded my monitor, I got a really nice set of monitors.

I was so mis… You will never see me as miserable as when I get a nice new set of monitors, because I’ve got to do everything all over again. I don’t know what anything means anymore.

And you have to learn the interaction of those monitors to your room. You have to learn how that translates. And this all comes pretty intuitively.

As human beings, we’re really good at this, about learning these things and adjusting sort of the way we perceive sound to compensate for it. But yeah, you get a new pair of speakers, and especially when you put a new pair of speakers where the old pair of speakers was, it’s going to be so different. And I would say, maybe not most of the time, but a lot of the time, even if your speakers are objectively better, even if they’re working with the room better than the old pair was, you’re going to say these sound worse, because they’re different, and you have to get used to them, and it’s going to take time to get used to them.

Or you might say they sound better because you just spent a lot of money on them. Sure, especially if you take those speakers out of the box and you put them up, and you do a mix on them right away. I don’t think it’s going to be good, period.

How can you say no? Yeah. What I think Burnin comes from is someone really clever basically told someone who’s saying, “Hey, I listened to these speakers before.

They sounded great. Now I got them in my house. They don’t sound so good.” And somebody was like, “Just,, just…” You got to listen to them a long time.

This is effectively the equivalent of when your cable modem doesn’t work. You call them up and they ask you, “Did you turn the cable around?” Do you ever get that? Sure.

Just go in and turn the cable around. And the reason they tell you to do that is because people get so mad at them when they ask, “Are you sure you got it plugged in?” I don’t know. I think you might be right.

The only other thing I’m wondering is, the speaker technology has changed a lot too. It has. Imperial Science has advanced substantially.

And we’re at a point right now, if you buy a speaker from a decent manufacturer, you’re probably getting a woofer cone that is made of a material that will not deteriorate over time the way it would if you buy a speaker in the 70s, or at least will not do so as substantially as they were prone to do. The specific word that we use to describe this phenomenon is compliance, which is basically how much force does it take to move the woofer cone off center and how fast does it get back to center. And that is what is theorized, is changing as you break the speaker in.

Is it the compliance specification is changing because the rubber is… Compliance with a P? Just regular compliance?

Yeah. So the thought is that the rubber is loosening up as you move it over time. Yeah.

And that’s not really the case with rubber, period. It’s certainly the case with leather. But rubber is pretty resilient.

It tends to go back to where it is. And yeah, with modern material science… Do you guys plan on doing like a leather line of modern…

No. No, we really don’t. I wouldn’t say that you’re going to change the compliance over time.

And again, certainly not in a way that you’re capable of perceiving and saying, “Oh yeah, these sound better now that I broke them in.” It’s funny because I had… In my defense, part of the premise was like, this might be correlation and cause. I’ve been doing this forever and my speakers sound good.

It doesn’t mean that’s what’s making my speakers sound good. I think it’s really interesting though. I can’t…

I put on a whole new shirt and made it real. You could have told me before. We have a video about this.

We get asked all the time is, “How long should I burn in my speakers?” Don’t burn in yourself. Burn in your ears. Sit with these speakers for a while.

Really listen and get used to them before you try to start working. Which is good advice, period. I don’t care if you get a new pair of speakers.

Take some time and just listen to stuff you enjoy. Watch a movie on them, whatever you need. Because you need to wrap your head around the way they sound.

I recognize I’m saying this to somebody at a company that makes speakers and loud speakers. I think a lot of the value of your speakers is just in the time that you put into learning them. We want things that can really reveal the full picture and image and all of that stuff.

But plenty of people, you got people mixing on crazy stuff. It’s the time that you’re spending on it. I couldn’t agree more.

Yeah, I would not get too preachy. Preach. It doesn’t matter what you’re mixing on.

If you listen to your mixes on something other than what you’ve used to rate them and it sounds good, then you’ve done a good job. You don’t need to second guess your process. There’s a mixer named Andrew Sheps, a pretty famous guy.

He does a lot of courses on mixing. Big crazy hair. And he will say that the speaker’s timbre doesn’t matter.

That you’ll get used to it. Now Andrew Sheps is really good at what he does. And he’s got really good ears.

I would argue against his saying that the speaker timbre doesn’t matter. I think it does matter for most of us mere mortals. For Andrew Sheps, you can probably mix on an iPhone.

The rest of us need better tools. But I have been in rooms that shouldn’t work. The frequency response is all over the place.

The bass is no good. And I’ve met people who have been working in those rooms for years. 10 years, 15 years.

The mixes they’re producing sound fantastic. And we’ll talk about, oh, you should calibrate your speakers. You should go through this and this.

And they’ve done it and they can’t work in that space that way. Because they’re so used to how the speakers are interacting with the room. They’ve got it so dialed in.

It’s just such a part of their process. They don’t really have to think about, oh, I should fix this frequency response. The difference between a really good mix engineer is that they know what it is supposed to sound like.

Or what they want it to sound like. And that includes whether or not it’s in that room or whatever. But if you’re mixing without a target, I think that’s one of the hard things about mixing in general is it’s hard to know when you’re done.

Especially if you’re inexperienced. If I turn this whole thing, will it be better? And, oh, how about this?

I’ll put this on here. And it gets better and better and maybe one more thing. Could it be better?

I don’t know. Let’s put another thing. Like, and you just kind of keep going at some point.

You’re in danger of overworking. But I think that’s also indicative of lacking a target. Like I can see the finish line here.

I know what a finished mix sounds like. I know my reference tracks. You just watched that whole thing.

I propose that you might know someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class. Also, Callie is kicking back $100 to put you in an incubator if you buy a set of speakers. That’s pretty cool.