Speakers, like a baseball glove, need to be broken in before you get the best performance from them.
Simon Côté of Audio Plus Services, the North American distributors for the Focal XS system I recently reviewed, gave me a shortcut for doing that: “pink” noise.
No, I hadn’t heard of that either. But this is the Internet age and Googling “pink noise” not only gives you an explanation -- basically pink noise is a jumble of all frequencies -- but also sample pink noise sound files. Open a file in your computer’s music player, set the player to loop endlessly, and then head out the door because the static sound is awful to listen to. Do that for up to 48 hours and your speaker system will be broken in. You would get the same effect after using the speakers normally over time; this just speeds up the process.
Côté says what happens is that the suspension parts in the speaker loosen up and let the components that vibrate to generate the sound do so more easily. The practical effect with the Focal system was that its initial brightness (excessive high frequencies) went away, proper frequency balance was achieved, and the XS delivered smoother, more natural sound.
So now you know: pink is the answer.
