Driver break in time - how serious???

Good day all,

I just got a pair of THAM12's built and will be painting it tomorrow. I have a pair of Faital Pro 12HP1010 to load in the THAM12's.

The local dealer of Faital Pro (who also does installations) said they normally just play their new speakers at half volume for about 1-2 hours then crank them up. However their speakers are normally front loaded square boxes and not tapped or foldered horns.

I have a gig this weekend and was wanting to know how serious is the break in period and what would the repercussions be if not adequately broken in.

Its not that crucial to force break in a driver. I find that new drivers don't sound quite the same as broken in drivers, but one night of use and they will be broken in just fine. Forcing the driver to break in is just putting mileage on the driver.

There are other people who will disagree with my opinion on this, but I have used speakers which have not been broken in, and nothing went wrong. Do test them though.

Read on another forum that it is recommended for at least 10 hours break in time for any speaker before max power use. It was recommended to use a pink generator of 50Hz to 85Hz.

Unfortunately I didn't have a pink generator so I used test tones from 40Hz to 120Hz (in 5Hz increments) and played it for about 2 hours last night.

Is it safe to use the test tones???

If so, I can run it tomorrow whilst I am at work which should give them a total time of over 10 hours and by the evening I can load them in their boxes.

No need to take it so serious,

Just run the cabs at the event like you need to. As someone else said, the T/S parameters will be out until 10 to 20 hours of hard use, but that will not affect other operational conditions.

Think of the drivers as motocross engines. Start the engine, then go flat out from the lights.

If you smell a slight wiff of curing glue, then nothing to worry about, if you smell burning formers or see smoke, time to back off the throttle.

If you leave your drivers hooked up to a noise generator or someting similar on the pc playing a sine wave at mid power (ish) just enough so the drivers are flapping around abit. then just leave them overnight. after maybe hold back a few more hours before going max out. Im planing on doing something similar when i got my next batch of drivers in.

You really dont need a massive break in time, I have recently been testing a bunch of 18" drivers, some with no break in period, and some with 4-6 hours of 25 Hz at moderate power, and then some others with 8-10 hours break in, there was very little measurable difference in output SPL.

I have also seen the threads about drivers failing without break in period. Reality is this shouldnt happen, Ive seen glue come unstuck on spiders and it been blamed on not breaking in the driver. I personally dont believe it, I think it's down to poor glue and/or massively excessive excursion.

If you plan on caning your speaker with massive overexcursion, no amount of breaking in will help you. Just be sensible, and treat your drivers correctly.

Thanks all. Much appreciated for all the advise