Did you follow my link? Human perception and especially sonic memory are very unreliable, not to mention the financial incentives unscrupulous marketers have in convincing gullible customers that their newly acquired electronics and transducers won’t give their best until after their return privileges have expired.
I was the JBL Professional field rep for the PNW region for 34 years. I was chairman of the PNW region of the Audio Engineering Society for three terms. I went to school in the discipline. What are your credentials?
I will be brief in my reply to you. What I said was that the compliance and spider of a transducer are the components that typically break down over time and that this is not beneficial for accuracy. Any actual speaker break in that might affect what a human could conceivably perceive occurs within the first few milliseconds of the transducer being initially activated. Please do follow the link I provided in my first post to this thread for a complete explanation of the utter lack of physical evidence in support of the rather specious rationale for speaker break in.
Retailers and manufacturers count on gullible consumers believing that it takes many hours for electronic products to break in as if one actually believes this, it makes a terrific argument against returning the product due to disappointment. You can’t really return something if you believe it has not yet reached its full performance potential.
Please follow the link I provided. The physical principles that govern sound reproduction are well understood and standards for measurement are equally well understood and correlate extremely well with what we hear. However, no proof of correlation is possible for people’s “beliefs.” Human psychoacoustics are complicated but not nearly as perplexing as the human penchant to believe what we want to believe in the face of evidence to the contrary.
I don't have any credentials. Nothing scientific, just been a musician for 60 years, and worked in a recording studio for 3, as well as personal experience using many many different speaker systems over those years. No disrespect, but I've known field reps for various companies over the years. What you listed as your credentials to me reads "I'm a sales rep, and have been for 34 years, and I took training courses for what I sold". Nothing wrong with that. I worked in sales too for many years, but that's not the same as an actual audio engineer who designs and tests audio gear. I've known those too. They're a different breed. Every sales rep for every company is always an expert for the product they represent, and absolutely positive what they're telling me is unquestionably true. That's the nature of sales reps. Everybody has a 'link' to prove what they told me is true.
I've experienced and learned many things over the decades, and one thing I've come to realize is while science can be formidable, it still can't explain everything. Regardless of what it's called, something is happening when you suddenly notice a change you weren't expecting or looking for. When that change is enough to get your attention, something happened. You can call it imagination, or whatever you like, but I'm not going to dismiss it because somebody in a lab isn't able to reproduce it.
If it was only me that was experiencing this, then yes, I'd go along with it's me that's changed, but when many many people report this same phenomenon, and have for years, something is actually happening.
As a musician, and having worked in a recording studio, I can tell you that people have various levels of hearing ability. You must have discovered this when dealing with customers. Music instruments that are the same models, have different sound characteristics from each other. Amplifiers that are the same models can have variances, with some just sounding better than others for some reason. You can call it imagination, but when you're used to working with certain things, and suddenly one stands out, you notice it. It is what it is. Based on my own personal experience, and what others are reporting, regardless of what you want to call it, something is changing in high-end speakers after they've had a certain number of hours of real-world usage.
