Originally Posted by DavidNZ
Most headphones get better with age, so to speak. Some say the burn-in on most cans is roughly 100 hours. I noticed significant improvement on the soundstage and bass response of my Sennheiser PX200s after about 70-80 hours of use.
I've heard two camps of thought about this.
Camp #1: Burning in your headphones improves the sound quality.
Camp #2: Burning in your headphones does nothing to the equipment; rather, it's more a psychological effect, where your ears/brain gets used to the sound of the headphones and they start to sound better. In other words, you just think you're burning in your equipment; in reality, you're really burning in your ears.
I have no clue which camp has got it right. I haven't seen any controlled tests of either hypothesis.