How to Break In a Guitar Speaker

Breaking in your guitar speaker — is that really a thing? Is it important? How big a difference in sound does it make? What’s the best way to do it?

When we decided to compare 26 replacement guitar speakers for the “Does Your Guitar Speaker Matter?” article in a side-by-side listening comparison, we had to consider those questions. As Matt Duncan, Sweetwater’s director of merchandising for guitar amps, pointed out: “You can’t just pull speakers out of their boxes and listen to them.” Oh, really? Sure enough, speaker break-in is a real thing. But how do we accomplish that?

What IS Speaker Break-in?How DO You Break In a Speaker?Let’s Rewind to the BeginningCall In the ExpertsWhat Did We Do?The Bottom Line of Speaker Break-in

The studio before unboxing the fresh speakers. That’s a lot of speakers!

What IS Speaker Break-in?

First, let’s define what “breaking in” a speaker really means. Speakers are electro-mechanical transducers, which means they convert one form of energy (electricity, like the voltage coming through a wire) into another form of energy (sound, via the piston motion of a speaker diaphragm). Pardon my oversimplification, but speakers consist of wires, magnets, a diaphragm (the part you see and hear), and a rigid frame to hold all the pieces in place. And all those pieces are held together with glue. A far more complete overview of speaker components is available in the article “How Does a Speaker Work?“

The critical part is that all those separate components are assembled into a whole, and they come off the production line and go straight into a box or a speaker cabinet. And you’re ready to go.

Or are you? Well, not quite. All those separate parts have never moved together in unison before. There’s a “burn-in” or “break-in” period required when all the parts need to work together harmoniously to find their equilibrium and balance. This “activation” serves to loosen up the parts and dispel the rigidity of the newly assembled components. The “right off the production line” components sound different from how they will sound after a few hours, weeks, or years of use. Any guitar player who has swapped a well-worn speaker with a new but identical replacement driver can testify to that. “What happened to my sound?”

So, the truth is: we really need to break in the speakers.

How DO You Break In a Speaker?

Since you came here to learn how to break in a guitar speaker, here’s how we did it. (How we ended up with this process, however, is a long and winding road. It was a very entertaining and informative adventure. Read on to hear the tale.)

For our listening test, we used pink noise as our source and ran each speaker at approximately 105dB SPL (C-weighted) for eight hours. Here’s a fascinating video that shows the change in frequency response we observed as the speaker went from brand-new (at zero hours) to broken-in (after 24 hours).

This video of SMAART frequency charts demonstrates how this speaker’s output changed over time when it was broken in using pink noise. We tested it at different intervals (zero, two, four, eight, and 24 hours) to listen to the guitar so that we could compare the changes.

Let’s Rewind to the Beginning

Remember that this all started when we decided to compare 26 guitar speakers. So, that meant breaking in 26 speakers! Whoa. That prompted several questions, such as:

What sound source do we use?How long does it take to break in a speaker?How much difference does it make in the sound?How many weeks would it take to break in 26 speakers if it takes 24 hours per speaker?If we hooked them all up at the same time, then could we do all 26 in one pass?How would you connect 26 speakers together and still end up with an 8-ohm load?

All the speakers are hooked up for an eight-hour break-in session at Sweetwater Studios‘ Studio A.

When looking for answers to these questions, we did what most people would do — search the Internet. Wow. Do you have any idea how many opinions and options there are for breaking in speakers? Here’s a tip: don’t Google “breaking in guitar speakers.” That’s a big ol’ rabbit hole. I won’t detail all the options out there, but they are numerous and vary wildly. Some are even humorous.

Next, I turned to our smart Sweetwater employees. We have lots of guitar players here, so I got more authoritative — but equally diverse — answers. This was getting interesting and a bit confounding. They were all valid opinions, but they weren’t definitive.

Call In the Experts

Where did I turn next? To the authorities — the people that design and build the speakers. They should know more about this than anybody. I called up our friends at Celestion — they know a few things about guitar speakers. According to Celestion’s “How to break-in a guitar speaker” web page:

A brand new, out of the box guitar speaker will subtly shift in tone over the first few hours of playing as the fibres within the cone start to relax and become more pliable. Don’t worry too much about this change, its [sic] natural and many people believe that this improves the sound, making it more ’rounded’ and pleasing to listen to... Play for at least an hour, using lots of open chords, and chunky percussive playing.

I scheduled a Zoom call to chat about the subject and was joined by these fine gents from Celestion: Paul Cork, head of engineering; Andy Farrow, sales director; Rick Skillman, OEM sales manager for North America; and Josh Martin, business development executive for North America.

On the Sweetwater end of the call, I had our experts: Don Carr, content creator; Nick Bowcott, content creator; Matt Duncan, director of merchandising for guitar amps; Darren Monroe, senior category manager for amps and effects; and Mat Smith, associate category manager for amps and effects.

What followed was a very lively and animated discussion.

Fuston: Can you offer more insights about breaking in speakers, apart from the advice you have on your website?

Cork: The hour or so of playing big, chunky chords will give you something like 80% of the break-in. Then, just regular playing — it’s an exponential curve. Then, all the magic happens years down the line. You can shorten that with a run-in period. There are two basic kinds of break-in. There’s low-frequency excursion, which will break down the surround edge of the speaker, lowering the resonance and giv[ing] the bottom end warmth, if you like, and that’s probably 75% of it.

But the real magic happens when you get all the fibers in the pulp moving, rubbing together, taking the edge off each other. We’ve found that something like pink noise is a good way to do that. Typically, we use two-thirds of the rated speaker power for a couple of hours and probably filter the bottom end to 60Hz because we don’t want too much excursion into a paper cone because of the risk of damage. We’ve found that pink noise is the best balance of low frequencies and high frequencies.

Paul Cork, head of engineering for Celestion, joins us for a Zoom call.

On different break-in methodologies:

Fuston: There’s such a wide diversity of opinions on how to break in speakers — everything from “use only guitar,” “use music,” “use pink noise,” “don’t use noise,” “don’t use low frequencies,” “yes, use low frequencies,” “only break the speaker in with the style of music you typically play,” and more.

Cork: I’m quite worried that some of those might break your speaker rather than break it in! I mean, if people have the time and the will, I’d always recommend that they just play through it and break it in organically themselves and hear the change in tone and live with it and love it. But if they want a fast fix, then pink noise is the one we’ve found that does the best job. I’m not saying it’s the only way it should be done, and I’m sure there are lots of other ways to do it, but it’s the fastest and easiest for us.

Probably a more accurate way to use the pink noise signal would be to measure the sonic energy from the guitar and shape the signal vaguely around that. It should then only excite the right vibrations and modes in the cone and produce a more lifelike or “real life” run-in.

On what impact the sound source plays in the break-in period:

Fuston: Have you ever experienced the signal source changing the outcome in terms of what the speaker sounds like?

Cork: Yes, it will to some extent, especially if you’re breaking down the bottom end. It gives you a different tonal balance. With a guitar speaker, it’s all about the balance — how loud is the high against the low.

Fuston: Well, we broke in two speakers for 24 hours — one using pink noise and the other using guitar playing. After the break-in, we put them side by side and listened, and they sounded dramatically different. And then, we compared them to a “control” speaker that was just pulled out of the cardboard box. It sounded very different as well.

Cork: Did you hear the brand-new one as, well, brand-new?

Fuston: Oh, without a doubt.

Carr: It was that “neither good or bad” thing. It’s so subjective. If you want that extra peak in the upper mids, the treble knob on the amp, if you want those peaks, then the brand-new speaker is the way to go. What we noticed is that the first couple of hours is where the most dramatic change takes place. After four hours, the changes are considerably smaller.

Sweetwater’s Don Carr and Lynn Fuston talk on Zoom about the unexpected things they discovered while doing this experiment.

On finding the right-sounding speaker for you:

Bowcott: The thing that I found interesting is that it depends on which speaker you listen to first to dial the amp in. I listened to all three cabs blind because I didn’t want my small brain to, in some way, skew my perception of what I should be hearing. I found that the one I liked the most was different from what others liked. I liked the one that was brand-new, not broken in.

Cork: There’s no substitute for playing it for 40 years... I gotta tell you that as a speaker manufacturer, we do love a customer who likes that “brand-new, out-of-the-box” sound. Just carry on buying new speakers. You just need to change them for every gig.

Fuston: We thought about setting up a “Speaker of the Month” club, where you sign up, and every month, we send you a new speaker. That way, your speakers are always FRESH!

On touring artists who have to replace speakers:

Bowcott: What about big-name artists playing rock and roll who need to replace blown speakers? Do you know what they tell their techs to do when replacing speakers?

Skillman: Funny enough, when you’re playing at those kinds of volumes, as opposed to people who play in their basements or bedrooms, when you’re at gig volume — getting over the drums and vocals and ridiculous monitor levels — speakers break in pretty quick, so a lot of artists aren’t too finicky about it.

Farrow: Whenever I’ve done anything stage-wise, at soundcheck, they’ll beat the... out of it for 30 to 40 minutes and say, “Yeah, that’s good,” and then right into the gig — no more than that.

Skillman: I think it’s part of that 80% change that happens right away, and then the rest of it happens over 20 or 30 years.

What Did We Do?

Part of our test setup. One speaker was recorded using pink noise as the source. The other identical speaker was in a different ISO booth and had guitar tones playing through it.

When we started the break-in experiment, we wanted to determine the influence of two key factors:

What sound source should we use?How long does it take before a speaker sounds “broken in”?

Shawn Dealey, Sweetwater Studios’ head producer/engineer, and I decided to conduct an experiment to see what difference the source material made. We tried both pink noise and guitar on two different cabinets and then A/B’d the results. Carr gave us a loop of various styles of guitar to re-amp through the first speaker, and we ran pink noise through the other. Secondly, we wanted to find out how long it took before a speaker really sounded broken in and stabilized. To that end, Dealey set up a SMAART analysis system, and we recorded the sound of the speakers with a DPA 4011A cardioid microphone.

Mics on one of the Hughes & Kettner TM 112 speaker cabs we used as test beds for our speaker break-in experiment.

Once we finished breaking in the speakers, it was time to listen. What an experience that was. We had two broken-in speakers and one straight out of the box. We lined up all three cabinets side by side and let several different guitarists play through them without identifying which was which. The true blind test? Oh yeah.

The three Hughes & Kettner TM 112 cabs we used to compare the break-in process, lined up for listening.

What did we discover? That guitar players are a very diverse lot. While many preferred the speaker broken in with guitar, Carr preferred the one broken in with pink noise. And Bowcott liked the brand-new speaker the best! Oh, well. So much for a definitive consensus.

Sweetwater’s Nick Bowcott compares the two broken-in speakers to the newly unboxed version.

At the end of the day, we confirmed three things:

Speaker break-in is a real thing that has an impact on sound.You can accelerate it by using an accelerated break-in regimen.The initial sounds played through the speaker do affect what the speaker will eventually sound like.

The Bottom Line of Speaker Break-in

What was our takeaway? Play your sounds through your new speaker, and, over time, it will settle into the sound that you want. It can be as complicated or as simple as you like.

For our multiple-speaker break-in technique, we decided to use pink noise and burned in each speaker for eight hours. We wired up groups of four speakers, resulting in 8-ohm loads, and were able to use two Seymour Duncan PowerStage 700 amps to break in 16 (4×4-inch) speakers at a time.

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Sweetwater’s Shawn Dealey is very happy it didn’t take 26 days to break in 26 speakers.

Credits: Shawn Dealey, Jason Peets, and Tyler Bulone from Sweetwater Studios all helped with setup and recording.

Speakers wired up in series/parallel for break-in.
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