if you dont know and cannot interpret acoustically with the right set of concepts what you are hearing it is a mere change of S.Q. motivated by unknown factors or a bias to hear some change which we also inevitably project on the change phenomenon with no concepts to guide us consciously ...
Suppose you know your gear as an acoustic experience and suppose you know what parameters change you had done till the new piece of gear was added and their perceived results, for example timbre, bass, imaging, soundstage listener envelopment , sound source width , crosstalk , position , dynamics, reverberation time etc ; then when you add a co0mponent and install it in the right way, your body (not your ego ) remember the last S.Q. experience and can spot the change and interpret it as a feeling ...Your experienced ego will then come and think about the right concept to associate with the feeling but your ego must know the concept to begin with .😁
To verify what i am just claim : ask your old mother in law who never hear a stereo system "consciously" and in an educated way , ask her to describe the sound . She will say " this is good my dear" , what else could she said she had no concepts about sound parameters.😁
i just added silicone rings on the tubes of my preamplifier, my body/brain sensed immediately a change my experienced conscious ego interpreted FEW MINUTES LATER as a better imaging and a more detailed timbre effect without loosing the mids frequencies naturalness and with no loss in the bass and better highs frequencies .
The ego is full of biases positive acquired once as in the journey learning curve or acquired as negative biases related to hope, branded name, suggestion , marketing and ignorance but if our body /brain was trained for such in acoustics experiments it will be able to felt a real change and we may be able to interpret it because we had learned how to listen our memory feeling engraved in our body piloted by the set of concepts we studied and we will need to interpret any experience ......😊 If we never acquired these associated feelings with acoustic parameters modifications, the only evident feeling felt would be conditioned negative biases or false positive one .
This is why seasoned reviewers used to their room acoustic conditions or any acoustician know what he hear because it had felt it first and recognize which concepts he needs to interpret it ...
This is my description of my own experience as i understand it ...
We are not consumers passive conditioned dogs we can learn consciously using our own sense apparatus and body doing so ...
You cannot build a system/room at optimal level accordingly to his design quality with only negative -placebo effects, suggestions , and price tags and random modifications only .. You need to train your hearing body with the controlled set of parameters in the three working mechanical,electrical and acoustical dimensions. Then you learned consciously learning also to hear your body reactions and then associate it with the right concepts .