I talk with Steve Guttenberg on the phone a few times a month, and I very much enjoy our chats. When Steve suggested we have a conversation about measurements and their relevance to audiophiles and write it up as an article, I was all-in immediately.

I hope you enjoy our chat as much as I did.

I really wanted to objectively show break-in effects were measurable and audible.

"Desire," says the Buddha, "is the source of our suffering."

Guess I'm not going to get what I want, I'll just have to stop wanting it.

Wanna see what I did get?

Top Gear is one of the BBC’s biggest shows. They evaluate expensive cars in entertaining ways then turn them over to their anonymous racing driver, known only as The Stig, to find out how fast they’ll lap their track. Some say NwAvGuy is Stig’s geeky cousin. Instead of testing cars, as an Electrical Engineer, I design and test audio gear. I want to thank Tyll for requesting my thoughts on measuring electronics. I'm all for improving measurements

WHY MEASUREMENTS? Here are some key reasons:

Many of you will remember my previous attempt at analyzing break-in from this post. A lot of good comments and suggestions were made after the post, and I'd encourage those not familiar with this previous attempt to check it out.

Deciding that my time away at T.H.E. Show Newport would be the perfect opportunity to run some more break-in tests, I programmed my headphone measurement system to take frequency response, square wave, impulse response, and Total Harmonic Distortion data every hour for 100 hours.

Man! That's a lot of numbers ... I'm glad I have a computer.

The nice folks over at AKG decided to send me a bunch of Quincy Jones headphones, including three Q701s! That's good news for both you and me. For me, because it will allow me to do some experiments I've been wanting to do for a long time. The AKG K701, now reborn as the Quincy Jones Q701, is notorious for needing hundreds of hours of break-in before they sound right. I want to see if that can be measured, and in this article I'll show you the first sets of measurements.

It's good news for you, because when all is said and done, I'll give away two pairs of the Q701 headphones to some lucky reader.

So, let's talk about break-in, shall we...

Measuring what a pair of headphones sound like inside you head is no simple task. It's complicated in there.

No worries, in this article I'll take you step-by-step through the process of measuring the frequency response of a pair of headphones.