millercarbon,
Further beating a dead horse, driving the point home, like a stake into
the vampires heart, we all know that the reviewer is perfectly capable
of then writing about his actual experience of the movie IN SPITE OF
EXPECTATIONS!
That's essentially a re-statement of the old "I wasn't expecting to hear X, therefore X is real and not due to expectation bias."
As has been pointed out countless times now, that's a naive understanding of how our biases work. There are many forms of bias
Here's one list of cognitive biases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biasesSimply listening FOR differences can lead you to think you hear a difference even if you don't expect to. It's just how our brains work.Or, you may not even be listening for a difference, but at some point perceive that "something sounds different in that track from last time" and then presuming there is some objective reason, the audiophile thinks "Ok, what have I switched between, or introduced in to my system lately? Oh...that power conditioner, THAT must be causing what I think I hear. Or "oh, I'm sure the sound is different, so it must be BURN IN."
There are so many ways to misapprehend what is actually going on by ascribing a change in subjectivity to some objective change.
This is why when doing, say, medical tests, scientists don't say "Ok, let's round up a bunch of skeptics about this new drug. If they take it and report subjective changes, then it MUST be due to a property of the drug!" Scientists don't do that because they know that's a totally ignorant account of how biases can work. That's why they use control groups, blind and double-blind testing.
rodman99999
Anyone that discredits another’s abilities to hear improvements, in
their own systems, in their own listening environments, with their own
ears, should be considered condescending, insulting and/or(probably),
simply projecting their own ineptitude.
Please see above, rodman.
If you were to be involved in a medical study for a new treatment and they told you they'd be using double-blind protocol so that neither your nor the doctor's biases could confound the results, would you say "No, because the fact that, if I know I'm on the active treatment you won't simply trust my reports as TRUE, means you are being condescending, insulting and projecting your own ineptitude!"
Would you think that's an appropriate response to the idea of controlling for the variable of human bias?
I's simply a falsehood to say "if you didn't experience it, you have no grounds on which to doubt a claim." Particularly if the claim is in the form of anecdotal evidence, unsupported by objective evidence, careful testing.
If you tell me you bought a perpetual motion machine, it won't matter how much you say "You haven't even tried it, so you don't have any reason to cast doubt on my claim!" The odds are you are simply mistaken, and you'd need to produce far stronger evidence than "I'm really sure this is happening, and that's good enough!"