With the greatest respect Nick, I would avoid this particular phrase in your posts1. If you insist, just a quick thought.
With the greatest respect Nick, I would avoid this particular phrase in your posts1. If you insist, just a quick thought.
Have you read the science behind what price of steak most buy in restaurants and how the menu writers can influence our choices. I'll see if I can find the reference.
I found this one https://www.webstaurantstore.com/article/89/menu-psychology-the-science-behind-menu-engineering.html
This might help a little, but only in one specific area. David Robson has written a book called The Expectation Effect, it has been adapted for BBC in a series of talks on BBC sounds Radio 4.
I'm going to attempt to boil one side of the argument (as I read it) down to its essence and where that seems to leave us:
Measurements tell us that most electronics beyond a pretty basic level of design are essentially competent and blameless, bar a few outliers. So there is not much to choose between electronic sources and amplifiers, so spending above a notional threshold where this competence can be taken as a given, is not justified by the performance.
Measurements tell us that, once above a nominal cost threshold, all cables measure similarly and will be sufficient, so spending any budget beyond that necessary for a basically functional cable is unwarranted by the performance.
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With the greatest respect Nick, I would avoid this particular phrase in your posts
Consider the phenomenon of Hi-Fi salesmen who smile, nod their head, and tap their foot when they play the system the "recommend". But tend to look and behave in a less enthusiastic way when they let you hear something with a smaller profit.
For me, the big tell was the trip to the dealers who didn't realise one of the speakers they 'ilked' had a busted tweeter... and dismissed the ESL63s which sounded superb. Yet presented themselves to punters as "experts" who judged on sound.
Fortunately, not all dealers are like this. But as the romans (lamost) said, beware of the dog. 8-]
My goodness this is awful. This tends to throw out short term AB testing straight away. No way we can trust hearing for hearing. And taking stuff home- I say leave it in the box or risk having it hoodwink us. I wonder if the industry is aware of this appalling deficiency. I imagine that looking at charts is now problematic too. Too much weakmindness. Entropy. The whole affair slowly grinding down to a universal steady state wherein it's all clock radios. Well, maybe not exactly clocks.You can safely assume that all your perceptions are firing differently from day to day, even presented with the same stimuli.
Perhaps the only way to ascertain the desirability/qualities of a newly inserted audio component is to live with it Monday to Friday and August to December and see if a reasonably straight line of agreeable listening experiences can be elicited over a time period during which you are changing, the room air changes, entropy engages, whatever.
Exactly! And never unwrap the stuff at home!Precisely why unsighted comparisons are so valuable, first ascertain if there is any difference whatsoever between components.
Keith
How you've been treated is absolutely unconscionable, hc! My word!here I am, ready to be shot down again...
I'm sorry if you took a beating hc, and sincerely hope I didn't contribute to that. For my part, I think your summary, above, is entirely fair and reasonable. Any negativity attached to it is, I find, largely down to the way it has been weaponised by the more objective side of the argument. That is most emphatically not your approach and I want to make very clear I don't consider your contributions in that vein in the slightest.It's good to see this thread generating some discussion and attempts to understand rather than argue without trying to understand. I'll sneak back in if I may, slightly bruised after the beating I took earlier and after many hours of pondering how best to get my point across without causing more controversy.
Quite simply, everyone, every day is subject to expectation/confirmation bias because that is how we are wired. That can be shopping for cornflakes, marking students' homework or flying a plane. What you/we will never know is what the effect is at that moment both in degree and direction. The effect is largely subconscious and may be zero or it may lead a completely false interpretation by whatever sense is in play.
All I have tried to counsel in many threads now is to understand that and try to take it into consideration. To some, that seems to be suggestion some kind of insult to mental capacity or technical experience. Ironically, I believe that knowing and accepting that such bias is in play can help to make better decisions (in my case especially in the supermarket!).
It's good to see this thread generating some discussion and attempts to understand rather than argue without trying to understand. I'll sneak back in if I may, slightly bruised after the beating I took earlier and after many hours of pondering how best to get my point across without causing more controversy.
Quite simply, everyone, every day is subject to expectation/confirmation bias because that is how we are wired. That can be shopping for cornflakes, marking students' homework or flying a plane. What you/we will never know is what the effect is at that moment both in degree and direction. The effect is largely subconscious and may be zero or it may lead a completely false interpretation by whatever sense is in play.
All I have tried to counsel in many threads now is to understand that and try to take it into consideration. To some, that seems to be suggestion some kind of insult to mental capacity or technical experience. Ironically, I believe that knowing and accepting that such bias is in play can help to make better decisions (in my case especially in the supermarket!). By the way, saying 'I was expecting no difference, but there was' is not a description of expectation bias. If I could go back in time, I would persuade whoever came up with the term to rename it Freddy's fallacy or somesuch because the active expectation in 'I wasn''t expecting' is no relation to the passive 'expectation' in expectation bias.
I don't know if anyone has bothered to Gooogle something like 'is expectation bias real'. I just did, and got 190 million hits. The first couple of pages included federal/government guidelines on how to prevent expectation bias fouling up forensic services, pages on preventing bias in clinical trials, guidelines on bias in assessing the work and education prospects of students, aircrash investigation reports on fatal accidents where expectation bias was a signicant contributor and thousand upon thousands of scientific papers demonstrating expectaion/confirmation/expectancy bias (these terms are used interchangeably between the EU and USA).
I try very hard on Pink Fish not to comment on the choice of cables or to react to what seems to me to be sometimes absurd claims for the crazily expensive cables other than to point out the above may be in play. I don't cable swap in my very modest system, save for the crazy 'ex Mirage jet' interconnect sold to me (at a discount 2 week's salary) in the 90s by a work colleague who was just setting up in the HiFi business. I did hear a difference when I put them in, but over time became less convinced. My career then took me into the world of sighted biases and here I am, ready to be shot down again...
Someone can "beleive" all kinds of things. Sometimes their belief will be well-founded in reality, sometimes not. Sometimes we have good evidence that falsifies a belief, sometimes not (... possibly 'yet'). All depends on both the belief, our current state of knowledge of, and the reality.
The problem with a sweeping dismissal of what you describe as "expectation bias" is that this then implies no-one ever makes a mistake when the *attribute what they observe to a specific 'cause'*. Someone may easily hear a 'difference' but then may be wrong about the 'cause'.
How you've been treated is absolutely unconscionable, hc! My word!
As of course you know Jim:Someone can "beleive" all kinds of things. Sometimes their belief will be well-founded in reality, sometimes not. Sometimes we have good evidence that falsifies a belief, sometimes not (... possibly 'yet'). All depends on both the belief, our current state of knowledge of, and the reality.
The problem with a sweeping dismissal of what you describe as "expectation bias" is that this then implies no-one ever makes a mistake when the *attribute what they observe to a specific 'cause'*. Someone may easily hear a 'difference' but then may be wrong about the 'cause'.
So when I swap in and out a particular interconnect/speaker cable/power cord and hear the same effect each time, it's just my mind playing tricks? My mind creates a distinct aural impression for each brand of cable I try?
Have you ever considered that it's perhaps "expectation bias" that causes you to not hear the changes that cables make?
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4. Any interest in my attempts at some actual hi-fi-specfic advice on 'watch out for' points or on a table of supposed upgrades?