The process of break-in isn't necessary. The recommendation is never to go from off (cold) to full power. This applies whether the driver is brand new or 10 years old. Allow the heat to build slowly, which is to say for a few minutes, before pushing the levels up. Gradually heating the coil allows it to expand more slowly while allowing the adhesives and other materials, which heat more slowly than the metals, to increase temperature without cracking.
You just got a new sound system and you have a question. Do I need to break in my subwoofers?
There's a lot of debate on this subject. Some people will say do. Some people say don't. Similarly, there's debate on the subject of whether you need to break in an engine. Some people say you need to be gentle with it initially. Some people say, no, you don't.
I'm of the school that no, you don't. Ultimately, the reason is that your woofer is going to break in anyway. Whether it happens in the first 30 minutes or the first 30 days isn't really going to make a huge difference to its ultimate state.
If you are going to be gentle and conservative with it throughout its life, it's not going to break in as far as if you're going to flog it throughout its life, and its life expectancy will be shorter if you're going to flog it throughout its life. But ultimately, the break-in time period isn't really going to make a huge amount of difference.
Things that you do want to be aware of, whether it be initially when you first get it or even further down the road, are potentially maybe one of the reasons why people consider the break-in process as necessary. When you first power a woofer, it still has some curing to do. The adhesives do have some curing to do.
So the one thing that is different with a woofer and an engine is that when you start adding heat to the voice coil in a woofer, it's going to finalize that sort of baking process of the adhesives that stick the whole thing together. And you don't want to do that at a huge hit all at once. It doesn't take that long, but what you don't want to do is just go from start up to full throttle.
Now, break-in versus warm-up is a different sort of discussion. When you're going to do an engine break-in and you start the engine, you warm it up, then you can, you know, full throttle it. When it's cold, the tolerances are not where they could be. If you think about it from the point of view of the most extreme technologies, you can't start a Formula One engine when it's cold. They literally have to put it on heaters and warm the metal up so that it has enough clearance to actually turn over.
With any engine, when you break it in, you don't want to just go start full throttle. You want it to come up to temperature so that things stabilize. Similarly, with a woofer, when you first get it, when it's brand new or when it's, you know, six months, six years old, you don't want to go from cold to full power.
That's again, that's not a breaking thing. It's just the thermal shock. The pieces need to be able to expand and contract. They don't all do that at the same rate. Aluminum, steel, adhesives, copper—they don't all expand and contract at the same rate. The more rapidly you introduce that change, the more chance there is for there to be a problem, to create a problem with them expanding at different rates.
If you bring them up to temperature a little bit more slowly, they will be able to integrate those shifts over time more easily and be less likely to cause damage. So break-in, no; warm-up, yes. Ultimately, that's the recommendation.