So how much do you think the placebo effect impacts our listening preferences?

The room/speaker factor is the single most difficult thing in a loudspeaker system to get correct. Room dimensions, reflection points, nulls, etc. This is the single greatest headache of getting a loudspeaker system correct, in my opinion.
With headphones, you don’t have to worry about any of that.

Please clarify because I’m having a hard time trying to make heads or tails of what you said.

You are right the room/speakers is the most difficult thing to get corrected FOR SURE....

BUT when you start with an empty room the road is LONG and the POSSIBILITIES in acoustic controls HUGE...

Then the difference between your room BEFORE acoustic treatment and controls and AFTER it, is nothing less than COLOSSAL....If rightly done and remember that passive treatment in general dont replace active control with Helmholtz method....


When you buy an headphone if you mod it, damp it, anyway possible the difference between before and after are relatively big sometimes NEVER colossal... Because you are stuck with the acoustical properties of the shell chosen by the designer...


The room enclosure by contrast is malleable like an acoustical clay.... Give me a room i will recreate it at no cost....I know how now...

my headphones i modded all of them the seven with success....But no comparison between them and the COLOSSAL potential of the speakers/room SQ...They all sleep in my drawer now... 2 dynamic 2 electroacoustic, 2 magneplanar, one hybrid...I begin my audio journey 8 years ago or 9  with many headphones because i was flabbergasted by the improvement in S.Q. compared to my speakers/room untreated and uncontrolled...

Is it clearer?

It will take very serious headphones to beat my 500 bucks system room now...none of my 7 one could do it....Even improved by mechanical and acoustical controls....

I dont want to pay 6 thousand dollars for a dedicated headphones system to be relatively on par with my room even if possible but it is not.....Save perhaps the more costly one i dont know....

“So how much do you think the placebo effect impacts our listening preferences?"

Pretty much totally.
Only Miller thinks he is totally objective.
And he is wrong.

He denies the results of many many scientific experiments.  But then he denies science most of the time anyway.

He believes what arrives in his brain from his ears is always the totally objective truth and nothing else is relevant.
He is wrong.

He is no more wrong that those who think that all audiophile impressions are pure subjectives impressions to be eliminated...

Reality is more complex than what those who argue here one against the others think...

I never negate myself the pervasing presence of biases positive or negative one, biases to be eliminated and biases to be cultivated...

I never put all the eggs of my audio basket in the engineering design upgrade market either.... i looked for ways to embed any system with science at hand or in some cases without any science available to me, but only my ears, in strings of CUMULATIVE listening experiments...

Call that an audio journey...

Then i prefer Millercarbon "alleged" ignorance to the "alleged" knowledgeable believer in engineering design power only, with their systematic blindtests, they never used anyway save in shows and arguments...

I dont need systematic blind test to tune my room nor to eliminate vibrations and to control the electrical noise floor...Simple informal occasional accidental or implemented blindtest of my own will do it....At no cost....

When you buy an headphone if you mod it, damp it, anyway possible the difference between before and after are relatively big sometimes NEVER colossal... Because you are stuck with the acoustical properties of the shell chosen by the designer...

This is true. Great information!

I love a good audio placebo effect - especially if it's cheap. I know I'm susceptible to my audio perception being amazingly transformed simply by being told something about the sound source or given a suggestion of what I should be hearing. Ever hear those evil rock 'n roll records played backwards before someone tells you what the devil's words are supposed to be? I never can make out a single word until I'm told what the words are supposed to be, and then I hear them suddenly very clearly, and can't unhear them. Also, what I'm looking at makes a big difference for me. If I can see that I'm in a wide open space I hear more spaciousness, even when I'm wearing headphones. Walking at night with headphones can be amazing.  
Audio is lacking in information, forcing our brains to make up what's not actually detected by inference from other senses. Just like the spinning ballerina silhouette illusion - I can't determine which way she is spinning with the information given, but my mind makes a decision in ways I know not and it's very difficult at that point for me to envision her spinning the other way. People talk about depth and layering in audio. With our visual system we actually have depth detection from both triangulation and shifts with small head motions, as well as comparing relative sizes of know objects at a distance. With sound it's not nearly as precise, and what one person perceives from a pair of speakers as depth and layering another person with perfectly good hearing may perceive as something less good. There's a lot of corrective imagining going on to create the effect of audible depth because what is actually reaching your ears is significantly different than what a real signal at the perceived distance would be. I used to say you have to mentally cross your ears correctly to hear the effect, like those picture books with the repeating patterns. If you get your eyes set correctly you'll "see" the 3D shape. If you do it wrong everything will be perceived as inverted, quite awkward and unnatural, but you'll still see the shape of the teapot or whatever. I know the same can happen for me with audio, and a depth effect can be created with some equalization effects. This sounds very bad though if my brain refuses to decode it as depth. Instead I just get strange tone from a sound source that I'm perceiving as being closer to me.