Okay, Headphone Burn-in is real

I’m nothing if not a man of integrity, and when I’m wrong, I make good. Last year, a review of the available data surrounding headphone burn-in was published with a pretty convincing answer as to what is responsible for the perceived existence of headphone burn-in.

Headphone burn-in is real… in your head. However, it’s worth exploring this idea a little bit in order to cap off our trilogy of headphone burn-in articles. If you’d like to skip to read the paper itself without my editorialization, it can be found here.

It’s your brain burning in, not the headphones

Getting the obvious out of the way, our brains are super, super good at fooling us — even when we think we’re grounded in reality. For whatever quirk of evolution deemed it necessary, our emotions, mental state, and even people talking to us can fool our brains into thinking it’s perceiving something when it’s not. It’s a little unnerving to know that you can’t always trust your senses, but it’s one of the many things that make life interesting. Not much we can do about that except acknowledge the fact that what we hear may not be what’s really going on.

When we “hear” things, it’s not just the raw output of our ears that we experience. Hearing is both a mechanical process of your ear transcribing sound into signals, and your brain interpreting these signals — but how they’re interpreted can be affected by our brains being really weird. Additionally, our ears can also alter what gets sent to your thinker as a response to loud sounds, hearing loss, or even stress. Both your ears and your brain will adjust to the world around you for various reasons, and when people notice this, they often erroneously attribute these changes to anything but themselves.

For example, after listening to a certain set of headphones long enough, your brain will identify its sound as “normal,” even if there are characteristics of the sound that would not be viewed that way by others. This is well-documented, and the topic is discussed more frequently these days. Listening to headphones over a prolonged period can alter your brain’s perception of what reaches your ears, and many think that burn-in must be real because they experienced it. But in actuality, it wasn’t the headphones that changed — it was you.

You’ve probably run into this before after buying a new set of headphones, and even AirPods enthusiasts have whacked into this reality lately. When the new product sounds so different than your old one, it can be tempting to think it sounds bad. But after listening to it for a long period of time, you’ll get used to it more, and going back to the product that “sounded good” will now seem quite different.

But it doesn’t stop there. As a defense mechanism, your ear will reduce how sensitive it is after you’ve been exposed to loud sounds (AKA “Temporary Threshold Shifts” or TTS for short). This is done to protect your ears by preventing noise-induced hearing loss. After this happens, it can take between a few minutes to a few hours to regain “normal” hearing again — but if this happens over and over, you could change your hearing permanently. If you listen to your music too loudly, it’s also possible that you’re altering your hearing every time you put on your headphones, reducing your ears’ sensitivity to certain ranges of loud sound.

Do me a favor: don’t do that. And if a product’s sound causes you pain, return the damn headphones. You can also look at our charts to see if we measured any high peaks that you should avoid as well.

Emotions can shape your memory

When you put on a new set of headphones, your brain goes looking for extra bits of context to help it decide what exactly it’s supposed to interpret. This process starts even before you start listening, as you’ll use your prior experiences to attempt to predict what’s coming next. However, as there’s a lot of missing data there, your brain will continue to fumble around until it finds something to latch onto. For example, if you felt good about making a huge new purchase, that would be enough to calibrate your brain into thinking: “This is good, I am happy when I listen to these headphones.”

Maybe you discover that you have a soft spot for how something sounds because it’s a characteristic of how your music sounded during a strongly positive life event or happy time. Your hippocampus is always on the lookout for sensory cues to tie to memories, and coming across strong ones like scents, music, tastes, and sights will often elicit an emotional reaction that fits the memory.

Conversely, if you are frustrated, stressed, or dissatisfied with something, your brain will become more sensitive to all the things you don’t like. What sounded great yesterday might have an annoying characteristic that’s impossible to miss the next day if you’re predisposed to being pissed off for some reason. That band your ex loved? They could create the most wonderful and poignant opera, but it would evoke nothing but frustrated revulsion if the breakup was bad enough.

Expensive cables are a great example of this. Since we know that cables of the correct specifications don’t sound different, it’s puzzling to continue reading that enthusiasts claim their system sounds better with bespoke, artisanal cables, when all available evidence suggests otherwise. If the sound didn’t measurably change with a new product, what did? The emotional state of the listener upon obtaining this new purchase. Though they’ll swear up and down that the music sounds better somehow — and often perform Olympic-level feats of mental gymnastics to describe it — it’s their brains associating the positive emotion of getting that new, expensive thing with the quality of the sound.

The internet makes it worse

There’s a litany of other ways that you can be influenced into thinking that something sounds good or bad despite reality — and audiophiles are very susceptible to this because of their communities. When someone reads something about a set of headphones they’re likely to buy, they remember it. They remember how others estimate something’s value, and allow themselves to view the product in the same way. This is dangerous because this kind of thought pattern enables multiple other cognitive biases to impact our perceptions on sound quality that have nothing to do with objective performance, or the things we’ve learned about our own hearing.

It used to be that audiophiles could only spread misinformation through marketing flyers, audio shops, and magazines, but the desire to share this passion with others was supercharged by the internet. Although audio gear as a hobby has been around for over a century, it wasn’t until forums, message boards, and chat programs that the ability to reach out and have real-time interaction with millions of people simultaneously became a reality. Trustworthy sources of information may be easy to find, but many hobbyists elect to stay within these groups and filter their perceptions through them.

Specifically, these communities — when not heavily moderated — fall victim to:

In-group thinking

Members of groups of people have a desire to belong, and will often adapt themselves or overlook incongruities with their own experiences in order to fit in. For some, a unified front on certain issues within the group is more important (or more believable) than an individual. Consequently, facts and opinions that challenge this cohesive belief of the group are often met with resistance and dismissal. Members of insular groups with beliefs contrary to reality often get unfairly insulted, dismissed, and demonized in an attempt to force group unity.

In the context of audio, there are a bunch of telltale signs that the community you’re in follows these tendencies. For example, many use the expert consensus lexicon — or even invented words with no agreed-upon understanding — in ways that don’t make sense, or don’t add information to statements. Epithets and insults are flung at category experts for challenging the group’s beliefs. Certain words or phrases can get you immediately shunned or identified as “in the group.” There are more signs that you should probably leave, but these are the big ones.

After a while, some community members will find that talking to someone outside this group becomes difficult and stressful as even the language they use changes. You’ll see people eagerly gobbling up bullshit about “danceable” cables or “musicality” that only some hyper-expensive component can provide — even though it’s weapons-grade hogwash.

It’s tough to combat this because humans are hard-wired to seek groups and safety within them. There are a number of mechanisms inside our head meats that reinforce this, such as increased trust for group members while our oxytocin levels are higher, and the fact that we can guide our brain to strengthen pathways necessary for these beliefs to persist long-term.

Prior “knowledge” and the Placebo effect

When people are coached to expect something as a result of a ritual, act, or event, they tend to believe it’s happening. You’ve probably heard of the placebo effect before in medicine, but it’s at work in many other places too. When someone you trust tells you that you can make your headphones sound better as a result of a long burn-in process, you can convince yourself that you’re hearing exactly that. Additionally, the time spent apart from your headphones can help you forget what it sounded like in the first place — and accept that the butn-in explanation given to you for any positive traits is valid.

With so many people reaffirming the benefits of a ritual like burn-in, it’s much easier for novices to believe that these people know what they’re talking about, and add it to the ol’ brain bank to help predict what they should expect. Once they’re presented with a new stimulus, the brain fills in any gaps with what they’re “supposed to” hear, et voila! What was suggested to the person is now reality for them.

Confirmation bias

Because at some point in the past, we as a species needed to identify patterns, remember them, and reject conflicting information to stay focused on said patterns, our brains still function like this today. Obviously, we don’t live in a world that requires us to hunt hirsute megafauna anymore, and this trait isn’t as useful for learning about ourselves as it is for hunting. This cognitive bias is called “confirmation bias,” or: “I only believe things that allow me to keep believing what I already think.”

Even when presented with proof or examples of something being untrue, most people tend to believe only what reaffirms their existing beliefs. This is frustratingly universal, and it’s tough to break the habit of embracing this trait because it’s central to how we usually operate. It’s tough to challenge yourself, especially when it comes to your lived experiences and core beliefs. But since our brains are wired to reject threats to our existing modes of thinking, we become our own worst enemies in a way.

It’s not your headphones, it’s you

While this is a very truncated sampling of the article linked at the top of the page, it does cap off our trilogy of headphone burn-in articles. The TL;DR of all three is:

• There’s no evidence of mechanical burn-in for headphones.
• Padding changes can affect sound in minor ways.
• Your brain is the source of any perceived effect of burn-in.

With that, hopefully, we can put this myth to rest once and for all. Just listen to your headphones like a normal person, and after you get used to them, see what adjustments you’d like to make if you want to use an equalizer. Don’t listen to people telling you that you need to burn in headphones. It’s all in your head.

It will be much more useful to move on to other fun audiophile arguments like listener preference studies, which equalizer settings are best, or the fact that there’s no correlation between price and performance.