I know you will point to plenty of satisfied customers, and that the efficacy of these tweaks can be experienced by anyone, and that many will testify to the effects.
Unfortunately, exactly the same level of anecdotal “evidence” is promulgated by every perveyer of dubious phenomena, from people selling crystals, magnets and homeopathy medical treatments to miracle producing swamis in India, to bufonted faith healers chanting in tongues and waving their jackets to have supernatural effect on an audience. They all share a common trait: far out claims unsubstantiated by any reliable science, and a reliance on subjective affirmation (and all....ALL...of them will point to converted skeptics “I was a skeptic and never would have believed it, until I experienced it myself!”).
The acoustic system resonators come off as the audio equivalent of selling ground rino horns for impotence: wild claims, add copy clearly playing on audiophile gullibility, with no scientifically established basis for the claims. (And I followed the controversy on those things). (Also if we want to exchange anecdotal experience, a local dealer became enamoured of the ASR products, demoed them a couple times for me and I never heard a bit of difference with them in or out of the systems. Though I don’t necessarily grant my experience any more credence in disproving their effects than I grant your experience in ratifying the claims of that company).
The thing is when someone thinks up a hypothesis that sounds even vaguely plausible (at least to themselves and to some others), and then this phenomenon is tests for via subjective methods that have no good controls for weeding out error and human bias, then virtually any wild idea can pass this form of test. So long as people believe it happens. This is why the world is utterly suffused by a head spinning array of alternate reality claims for any number of contradictory phenomena. (It’s why things like Mesmerism managed to sweep through Europe, among countless other examples).
I understand why we want to rely upon our personal experience. It’s our main way of navigating the world. Unfortunately the long, hard-won lessons of science has told us how good we are at fooling ourselves and just how rigorous we will want to be in vetting claims if we want to escape the flourishing of monsters arising from our powers of imagination.
I love, love, love high end audio and have for much of my 54 years. But I share some of J. Gordon Holt’s dispair about the hobby from this interview:
https://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/1107awsi/index.htmlMoney quote:
- As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me,
I personally use blind testing here and there to determine audible differences especially if what I’m hearing is inconsistent with any robust technical explanation. For instance, I could have sworn to anyone the sound of my system changed when I simply switched my streaming server from iTunes to a raspberry pi server. But as this made little technical sense (yes, I have read much of the tweakery on computer audiophile sites), I did a blind shoot out and it turned out I could tell no reliable difference once I didn’t know which was playing.
That allowed my mind to settle on the issue and whaddya know? I no longer perceive any such change in my system.
Same thing happened when I blind tested very highly lauded AC cables (even though in sighted tests I thought I heard a difference), same with things like Black Diamond racing cones (they appeared to alter the sound of my CD player sighted, but when a pal helped me blind test I could identify no difference when the cones were used or not). These are the things I learned when I really actually relied on what I could hear.
Dave,
If an audio rack in fact produced audibly different effects from, say, a CD player or pre-amp, server etc, especially of the nature so often described by my fellow audiophiles “deeper tighter bass, greater dynamics, smoother highs” etc, those should be measurable differences at the output end of the system.
But we virtually never get any such repeatable measurements in support of these claims - only anecdote piled upon anecdote derived from just the listening conditions, like you described, guaranteed to allow for bias effects.
And when there aren’t measurments to back up the claims, instead we’ll get more claims about the imcompleteness of science and “these things we are hearing can’t be measured yet...”
And it should be a red flag that these replies are exactly the same reply every other crackpot at the local Psychic Fair, Alternative Medicine, New Age guru etc gives when their claims don’t go beyond anecdotes.
So, I hope some of my fellow audiophile here will forgive me if I bring with me some well earned skepticism and a desire for our hobby to raise its standards of verification and research.
