The Placebo Effect


One of the things that should be taken into account in the evaluation of audio equipment, tweaks, etc is the Placebo Effect.

In the medical world, Placebos (open label or concealed) appear to mostly work on subjective symptoms, such as pain. They don’t work on an objective symptom — something a doctor could see or diagnose, such as a fracture on a bone. Placebos don’t shrink tumors, they don’t change your diabetes, and they’re not going to actually lower your blood pressure for more than 15 minutes, Basically, placebos appear to work on things that pass through the brain’s perceptual systems — where they can prompt the release of opioids and other endorphins (chemicals that reduce pain) in the brain. Bottom line, placebos can result in perceived improvement even where no actual improvement exists.

The same applies to our hobby. Probably too often, we sense improvement in SQ because of the Placebo Effect. Our money spent, hardware bias's, effective marketing, or being influenced by the experience of others (regardless if true), often have us believe that we have obtained improvements that don't really exist. This is not necessarily a bad thing because a perceived improvement, whether real or imagined is still an improvement to the listener. This may explain part of why certain "improvements" can't be measured. 

J.Chip
128x128jchiappinelli
So: Yes, some reported improvements from cables, fuses, vibration dampeners and such are likely placebo effects
Which can be verified.


And yes, some reported improvements are likely truly heard and experienced as real, permanent change by the listener.


Which could also be verified using the same procedure used to verify the former.

To argue we haven't reached the limits of scientific discovery is far fetched in the context of the placebo effect. We aren't measuring the device but the perceived human response. 
Nobody tune a piano with placebo effect....the tuning is a series of small incremental additive changes...

I have tuned my room in hundreds of change in a 2 months period and explaining everything with placebo is only possible by those who dont have developed any hearing experiments to help them...

They are like a boat without a rudder? Am i here or there? Why the ocean currents put me here and not there? Where did i travel ? Is my destination an illusion?

And because they are lost in the sea they think all boats they crossed are without rudder....

We are all susceptible to be lost at sea but not always without a compass, mine is acoustic control , control of vibration and control of the noise floor electrical level...No unreal change can fool you and stay long beside the real changes.... The two types of change exist at different level of existence and magnitude...

But changing arbitrarily what we think is a bad piece of gear and UPGRADING it, is often an illusion and a placebo effect at work.... Especially if we dont know how to embed our system in machanical, electrical and acoustical dimensions by ourself....When we are not ourself at the SOURCE of the change experimenting, we fool ourself with ready made costly sometimes illusory placebo change...

Stay away from cables or fuses upgrades especially in the first 7 years of your listening experiments.... 😁😊 They can induce the disease: placeno effect and chasing the tail or worst the moon...

Real change dont need test.... Because when the listener ITSELF is changed this is real most of the times.... When the listener interrogate himself this is unreal....He is not changed at all at this time but look and EXPECT for an external change that is unable and powerless to change him first, than  this change is unable to exist by itself....

When the change is real, the sound affect the body by emotion and objective EXPLANABLE cause most of the times, coming from basic science; when it is an unreal change it trick the mind to doubt but is unable to fool the body.... It is the reason why most people upgrade without satisfaction.... They dont know where they go.....Listen not the ears of your mind, but to the body ears.... Experiment....Being in active experiment is very different than being a passive consumers....This is the way to determine how to learn where you must go.... Acoustic basic science can help here and could guide us...


Then, save for exceptional experiment unexplanable but very rare in usual audio life , appealing to unknown science fact is often illusory.... Most change are explanable....But not all for sure.... But the main one are simple based science fact.... Easy to verify....The unexplainable also exist and it is very stupid to think that none exist...It is very simple to EXPERIMENT....At no cost....


Nobody tune a piano with placebo effect....the tuning is a series of small incremental additive changes...
Beautifully said. No need to discuss this any further.

All the best,
Nonoise

Ok, phew… One of the biggest challenges in all human thought is that we understand there is some kind of objective reality and that we can, in most cases, consistently measure it; and there’s also the subjective experience of that objective reality that our physical bodies construct, our consciousness experiences, and is very similar but not exactly the same from person to person.

Much of the history of philosophy and science is about trying to determine “where is the line” between the objective and the subjective. In fact, it’s safe to argue wars have been fought over this divide. Consider this thread! Thus the philosophical and scientific fields of Philosophy of Mind, Neuroscience and Behaviorism, and all that flows from them.


ah no. we can’t prove the existence of objective reality. there is no mechanism for that. the only thing that logic can prove or provide.. is that subjective reality is the core of all experience or observation by the observer.

And it can go no further.

thankfully, that’s a good thing. as we can’t advance if objectivity is in charge, due to the how the human mind works.

It gets into negative proofing and similar mindsets and tries to make itself safe and in the know of things..and puts dogmatism in charge. it’s why religion worked so well as the standard-bearer for so many thousands of years. It’s the monkey origins of the underlying mechanism of self realization or self reflection. Religion loves dogmatism and objective reality, as it goes circular really really fast (due to expressive limits in the face of unknowns) and is useful for fencing people in. Stop human thought today! be wholly objective in all analysis! Meet your own ass today!

Objectivity is an exercise in logic, nothing more. Properly handled it can be safe and very very useful in the progress of humanity. Improperly handled, it kills all around it.

this fundamental point about the animal origins and coloration of all possible avenues of conscious thought, is what gave the renaissance men of the early 1700’s the great idea of creating the vocational slot of engineering.

where rote training methods came into being along with formalized academia in all that... and poof!...engineering came into being (over some 20-40 years).

This is the only way they found they could create an army of useful people out of the complexities that physics was unfolding to them. As the bulk of humanity wasn’t going to be getting into the weeds of the objectivity/subjectivity problem --any time soon. Literally not wired for it. Such folks invariably have no idea what the question of consciousness means, and generally have to look it up in a book ....and then make a mess out of the analysis anyway.

So the renaissance folks of the time... understanding that there is no feasible group mind fix/change/repair (or an individual one outside of one-on-one Buddhism, etc), licked humanity’s mind and brain... and stuck it to the wholly illiterate television (passive unthinking observation and taking in of things) of objectivity - in a way that made these mindsets useful in building out the modern world.

Seriously. That’s how engineering came to be. In Bavaria. by the mid-late 1700’s it was pretty well functional and formalized and worked so well that the rest of the western world adopted it.

this is why Germany still has the best technical schools. They started the whole thing.

It’s also why a negative proofing objective engineering mindset has no place whatsoever in any science discussion unless they take their mindset and invert it and mentally move to proper science, and stay away from dogmatic texts that try to dictate reality to the art of scientific exploration.

As that act, that set of demands, that mindset norm of the vocation of engineering, is literally anti-science. All those scientific laws in engineering don’t exist in actual functional science. Science has only theories and relies on the observer as the fundamental, in order to take humanity forward.

Where OF COURSE this is not the entire package. Dissing it and picking what I say apart to try and dwell on some small nit and trying to blow it up into something bigger.. as some sort of method of disarming the discourse...is merely an act of desperation.

I await the retorts of objective desperation. For they will come, no doubt.
In 1978-79 I worked at an audio dealer who had an "electronic" switching system, so one could A/B not only speakers, but amps, preamps, CD players, etc.

One day I setup a customer to A/B a McIntosh MC2205 (solid state amp)  and a Luxman LRS (tube amp) and he spent a LOT of time switching back and forth, seeing the lights on the display change from "A" to "B".  After over an hour doing his comparisons, he told me at length how he perceived the differences between the amps and purchased the Luxman.

A few weeks later our repair tech notified us that he was replacing the circuit board in the unit, as it switched between the "A" and "B" lamps, but was only playing the amp connected to the "A" input, and that this was the case from the time the unit was installed.