Finally some believable sensible-ness (what is "tl;dr"??). I've posted elsewhere doing a power test for Ford, dozens of units at full power pink noise for I believe 280 hours. Cones slamming back and forth to their suspension stops the whole time. I had to work noon to ten, 4 days a week, go home watch late night TV, get up at the crack of 10:30 and "oh sh!t" dive into the shower and zoom up the freeway, repeat, go out Thursday night...and Friday Saturday and (bonus!) Sunday. Ahem. Back to the test, we had to keep pulling off units, cooling, testing frequency response and parameters. Fs kept dropping continuously-but not by much. Little by little by little. The frequency response, barely affected, since the magnetics weren't affected nor the mass, and compliance is just one response factor.
Therefore when anyone is posting stuff need a bazillion hours to break in (especially electronics!) I call it RP=Return Prevention, i.e. the customers ears will get used to it. It's pretty amazing how wildly and aggressively defensive some people will become defending break-in if you say that-somehow they cannot stand the idea that it is psychoacoustic and not physical. Back to speakers, I did see one data set somewhere on the internet showing a significant resonance drop; to me that's not a well designed driver.
Back to the thread, sorry, a super stiff thick rubber surround, yeah, some break in. 100 hours? I was about to say nonsense...but conflating my test story and SB's ten minutes
at close to full power let me contradict myself and think aloud that maybe 100 hours of music listening is what it takes to replicate that. Except for the "maybe music listening at normal levels just never exercises the surround much at all" and except for the "response not changing much due to compliance changes"
PLUS, that's the compliance of just the speaker. Once you put it in a box, the box adds its own invariant compliance, reducing the effect of woofer compliance changes...