Why no “Break in” period?
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_biases Simply 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!" |
millercarbon
Have you ever gone a step further, and "actually listened and compared" without peeking? I have. So have many others. It can be very educational, if you are open minded enough to learn that way. We certainly can hear many things that "really sound different" (due to objective changes in the audible range). But we can also "hear things" that aren’t objectively there. So, how do we deal with possible confounding factors? Blind testing is one way to do it. Back in the late 90’s I had a couple CD players and a DAC and I was SURE they sounded different. It seemed so obvious! Yet some "objectivists" online said it was unlikely, that a properly constructed DAC should sound the same. (Though, with caveats). Here’s the thing though: I was willing to accept that I may have been mistaken. I admitted that I’m human, subject to the normal human biases, which could be influencing what I "think" I heard. So I was willing to TEST MY OWN PRESUMPTIONS, and try to distinguish the units without peeking. I did a number of blind-test shoot outs (matching volume output at the speaker terminals). Guess what? Positive results! I could EASILY tell the units apart, because they (apparently) REALLY DID have the different characteristics I thought I"d heard. That was really cool. (Strictly speaking, this doesn’t entail that the objectivists claim was wrong; they left open that DACs/CDPs could be designed to sound different. Rather, they were pointing out that a well constructed, accurate DAC/CDP should be indistinguishable from another all other things being equal. So it’s not like I "disproved" that particular claim. Rather, I simply found support fro my own impressions that the ones I owned had different sonic characteristics) BUT.... There have been other results in blind tests I’ve done that indicate that what I thought I was hearing was in error. Once I couldn’t peek at which device was playing in blind testing, the sonic signatures I thought were distinct just weren’t there to distinguish A and B. Again, this comes from being open-minded enough to simply admit "I’m human, I could be wrong in how I’ve interpreted from my subjective impression to what is really going on." It’s nothing to be afraid of. Really. It just takes opening your mind, a bit more bravery to truly put your "golden ear" to the test without peeking. |
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