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Cornwall IV and break in


Shakeydeal

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I’m sure it depends on the type of music your playing, heavy bass music will soften or break in the woofers up faster then soft bass songs.
Do you have the mic and REW software to make a before and after measurements ?
That way you have hard facts and numbers to show you what’s going on. Your ears will mislead you unless you just start the music playing and leave it going and come back a week later, and even then I’m sure it would be difficult. Your going to get many different ideas about how to do this. No wrong, no right way. Just many , many different ways to do this.
Just play and enjoy [emoji6] ( the music ). Lol
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Burn or download a 20 Hz frequency track and repeat.

 

Get the woofer cone moving 3/16" or so and play it overnight or when you're out, if its too much at night turn it down a bit.

 

That will speed things up and the frequency is inaudible.

 

I know they are new but an air leak check would be good reassurance.

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1 hour ago, Shakeydeal said:

Does anyone have experience with the CW IV and how many hours they need? Mine sound a little tight and bright with only a dozen or so hours on them?

I had read   that a figure of 40 hours was required   before they sound great -------  

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5 hours ago, jason str said:

Burn or download a 20 Hz frequency track and repeat.

 

Get the woofer cone moving 3/16" or so and play it overnight or when you're out, if its too much at night turn it down a bit.

 

That will speed things up and the frequency is inaudible.

 

I know they are new but an air leak check would be good reassurance.


This too is good advice. Played Flight of the cosmic hippo loud like 10 times.

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When I got my Reference 7iii & RC64 same thing you described - sound was a little tight & bright. I previously had Chorus I and RC7 doing the same duties.

 

Mine get used the most for just plain old background music (FM) and TV. Only occasionally for full-throttle movies.

 

After many weeks of playing them relatively quietly, and a few (sound) blockbuster movies like Skyfall they sounded more natural and relaxed.

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When I worked at a high end home audio store in Tulsa back in the early 1990's, whenever new speakers came in, they would put them in the back room face to face and wired out of phase. Then, they would play them for the weekend at fairly loud volume, but, you hardly heard them.  By Monday, they were a whole lot better.  

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I have JUST finished breaking in a new pair of Kappa 15Cs.
 

Took almost a month at several hours a day. Swapped out the K48s in my KP301s downstairs so they would get more airtime than they were getting upstairs in my Cornwall mod.

 

Actually got up and turned  the bass control down today for the first time since the swap. 
 

Even my son asked what I had done to get so much bass.

 

Yet there are still people that think speaker break-in is a bigger hoax than Covid...

 

 

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8 hours ago, Shakeydeal said:

Thanks for all the replies. I have about 15 or so hours on them now and things are indeed improving.

 

Shakey

--- it's not only the  drivers but the all new design crossover components that are also breaking in   ----

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I found it started to sound good on the bass well past 100 hours with my new Cornwall IIIs. After 300 hours, it seems to have stabilized. I played a lot of tracks with strong bass but a lot of different types of music. I did not blast the speakers so it took more time.

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On 7/25/2020 at 9:50 PM, RandyH000 said:

--- it's not only the  drivers but the all new design crossover components that are also breaking in   ----

 

Here's what bob says about break in on capacitors... & drivers.  I think what he says about "brightness" is spot on. 

 

Q:  Do components have a break-in time?

A:  Some do and some don't.  Capacitors would be a definite NO.  Let's look at this one a bit.  

You have new good quality capacitors installed in your crossovers.  Capacitors have exactly two qualities that effect the sound of your music that goes through them.  Those are capacitance (what we use them for) and ESR.  ESR is the sum of all other qualities of a capacitor other than capacitance expressed as an Equivalent Series Resistance.  ESR is a bad thing.  Good caps have ESR so low it is barely measurable, on the order of  a couple of hundredths of an ohm.  ESR is made up of stuff like the resistance of the leads and their connections to the foil inside the capacitor or stray inductance or dielectric absorption.

So, we put our new caps in the crossovers.  These new caps are right on the capacitance value the design calls for and the ESR is almost unmeasurably low.  What exactly of these two qualities do you expect to change with break-in?  And if either of them changed, why would you expect the sound to get better since the only way they could change is to go away from the "perfect" values they had to start with?  I hope any caps you use in your crossovers are good enough that they do not change at all for many years of use.

 

Q:  But my speakers sound so bright after putting in the new caps that I have to hope they change with break-in.  In fact I am pretty sure they are getting better as I listen longer.  They must be changing.

A:  Sounding brighter is a good thing.  That means your old caps were really bad and had high ESR.  That high ESR had the impedance all upset on the crossovers and you had the drivers all trying to play at the wrong frequencies.  Also, the high ESR was directly attenuating the high frequencies.  Now with the new good caps, the frequency and level relationships are back to where the factory had them when the speakers were new.  The fact that you think they are changing now is because you are getting used to them sounding like they should.  The break in is occurring but it is inside your head instead of inside the speakers.

 

Q:  How about break in time for wires and interconnect cables?

A:  None

 

Q:  How about break in time for drivers or new driver diaphragms?

A:  Yes, and depends on the size of the driver.  Tweeter diaphragm probably break-in at a matter of seconds.  They are very low mass and move very little, so any break in would happen almost instantly.  Probably happened when the factory tested the diaphragm after manufacture.

Midrange are a bit bigger and have a bit more mass.  Break-in is probably on the order of minutes with these.

Woofers would take the longest.  I think that break-in on a 12 to 15 inch woofer would be less than an hour played at pretty good volume using music with a lot of low frequency content.  

 

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IMHO, If 10, 20, or even 100 hours of breakin would take a speaker from sounding "bright and tight" to "smooth and improved", Klipsch would surely find a way to incorporate driver break-in into their manufacturing process. ..Especially for a $6k pair of speakers.  

 

Speaker break-in (beyond a few minutes of play) is mostly a notion that manufactures allow to persist because it helps reduce the buyers remorse that sets in for some when they realize the colossal improvement they had expected from a new pair of speakers is instead a small incremental one.  The new owner is told to "just give a few hundred hours".  Of course, during that time the owner either adjusts to the new sound or re-visits all the great reviews that led him/her to buy the speakers and convinces themselves they'll hear the greatness as time goes on.  Just MHO.

 

Bob Crites, a noted authority on Klipsch, seems to feel the same.

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