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I know it’s all been said before but this is madness ….

chiily said:
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
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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-]
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
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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It suggests that the above is likely. But in individual cases the 'measurements' may have missed something. The snag is that we don't know for sure. Hence the value of alernative approaches to 'measurement' to see if that shows up anything which previously got overlooked.

e.g. Many decades ago slew-rate distortion wasn't on the radar, so some amps may have fallen foul of it in some conditions of use. This then got discovered and bigged-up as a 'problem'. In most cases it wasn't. But later amps tended to be designed to ensure it wouldn't be a problem... unless you used insane speakers... which then some hairbrained speaker designers duly made and sold. 8-]
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
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-]
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Ah, dealers. I haven't used them much in recent years, but have many fond, and not-so-fond, memories of their ways. My first step in any demo was to ask for the volume to be turned down, and to be left alone to listen for myself and decide whether foot-tapping was appropriate.

One in particular sticks in my mind. The listening room was plagued by a loud hum, which made any useful judgements difficult if not impossible. The dealer asked me what sort of music I listened to. I said, 'Anything but opera, really'. He then gave me a long lecture on why opera was the best sort of music, and despite my comments, played some opera. So, between the loud hum and the horrible screeching, there wasn't much point continuing with the demo.
 
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...
 
ampedup said:
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.
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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.

And autotuning. Hadn't they had their iPhones when recording Dark Side we'd be out of luck. Good thing Clare Torry's improv was scripted. That took foresight! At any rate, beware the ear for it is a trickster. And whenever possible, listen for duration, at home, to music, and like normal people. Way better.
 
hc25036 said:
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!).
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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.

But some of your fellow travellers are less considered and less considerate in the way they deploy this argument. There's a sort of implicit air of superiority which, ironically, indicates they don't really understand either. It comes across as 'I used to feel like you, but am now enlightened and don't any more. I have trained myself to be inured to these things and am largely immune. Learn from my hard-won experience'. (That's hyperbole to illustrate the point, but I trust you recognise the type, and the style). At its worst it comes across as 'You poor deluded sap, a victim of your own biases and prejudice'. It's hardly surprising there's push-back when faced with a subtext like either of those. And ironically, any implicit claims to have conquered the bias suggests they don't understand the largely universal nature of them.
 
hc25036 said:
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...
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Not shooting down @hc25036! As a staunch subjectivist, I’d agree with that strongly.
 
Good Morning All,

Trying to catch up and follow threads like this is really challenging.........

I don't understand how anybody could state that all DAC's sound the same. What exactly does that mean? If two different equipment manufacturers use the same DAC chip do we believe that both pieces of equipment will sound the same? I don't see how that would be possible given the different PCB's and components they will have supporting that same DAC chip?

I know there was a substantive difference between the Akurate DS/3 and Klimax DS/3. I don't believe expectation bias played any great part as there was much more detail and a far wider and deeper sound stage. I believe the Klimax System hub is better still but note I use the word believe as I wasn't able to do a side by side comparison.

Amplifiers most certainly do not sound the same. I've been listening to Naim and Avondale products quite a lot in the last 6 - 8 months. Given I reached something of a pinnacle with a NAC52 c/w Supercap, SNAXO 3-6 c/w Supercap and 10 channels of Naim amplification that has now all gone for something producing, for me, a far better sound.

There is a world of difference between the Avondale NCC200 and the prototype SE boards.

As I have posted elsewhere the challenge is just how many variations of components do you need to try on say the one amplifier board. There are 66 components on the prototype SE board. Just suppose there were 3 possible variations of components in each location. At the same time I'd want to try this against say three different speaker cables and three different inter-connecting device cables with each device connected with three different types of power cable.

Maths wasn't my best subject at school but doesn't that mean there are a phenomenally large range of possible outcomes?

Just possibly life is too short?

Regards

Richard
 
My two pennyworth is that, however much, or little difference cables make will in any case be dwarfed by a) issues with the speaker/listening room interface and b) the acuity of most pfmers hearing. So it's a kind of 'two bald men squabbling over a comb' situation for the most part.
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
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'.
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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?
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
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'.
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As of course you know Jim:

The use of the expression expectation bias is hopelessly confusing (if understandable) in the context. There is a much wider point that auditory informaiton is not processed in isolation in the brain and the information output of that processing is allocated to a particular sensory experience even if it comes form another source. And you cannot discern this by interrogating your own sensory experience. You don't "know what you hear" in the way people frequently say on threads like this, except in the tautologous sense that the experience you have is the experience you have. You hear things for reasons you canot possibly know yourself.

Aside from the examples I always trot out about McGurk effect, ventroliquist effect, whispering effect, volume change as sound quality, effect of colour on volume., I commend anyone interested to consider the many amazing effects discovered by Diana Deutsch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Deutsch
and of course
This is your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

Although many of them are given the term "illusions" the point is that they give an insight into all of the processing that goes into what the listener hears or thinks they hear. left and right handers will hear sounds coming from different ears, scales may be heard going up or down by different listeners hearing the same signal, and things can be heard differently just by giving the listener information.

I maintain that if one shows an interest in this stuff one pretty soon lets go of the idea that there is a simple reationship between (1) having a different listening experience (2) this being caused by a difference in the sound waves reaching my ears before we get onto (3) my ability to identify a particular change in the hifi causing (2).

For my own part I expect to have significant fluctuations in my listening experience from day to day, hour to hour, even hearing the same track twice on the trot. One might draw an analogy with what might be termed run to run variation in measurement. I have often wondered whether that point alone might explain the experimental findign that lots of people will persistently misidentify the same thing repeated as being different.
 
vesuvian said:
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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Again, expectation bias does not work like that. I don't know how else I can say this. I'll say it again - expectation bias happens and you need to take it into account if you know what changes are being made. It is not your mind 'playing tricks' - it is how it operates and understanding that is important to many very important activities (like flying a plane). The only area where there seems to generate such antagonism is HiFi it seems to me.
 
NickofWimbledon said:
1

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?
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@NickofWimbledon , sorry I'm not being deliberately evasive about your request: Please consider this response in the context of my last post in (faux) reply to Jim. That is all relevant to the question of whether one might reasonably conclude (as a strict epistemic proposition) that cables "sound" differenet based on anecotal report or even a difference in your own listening experience.


None of this necessarily has any bearign at all on the question of how anyone should enjoy their hobby (unless the epistemic question really matters to you). You would probably be amazed how little interest I have in that question: I'm an anarcho-libertarian in that regard. If you really want my advice as you request then it's all summarised in the signature. [but feel free to ignore. In fact please bear in mind when reading the following that it's a free country and I actually have no desire to tell anyone else how to live their life. But you did ask (more than once)] - let go of the idea that you are a sound quality evaluation device.

If the consequences of this proposition require unpacking they are IMHO as follows: don't assume that fluctuations in your listening experience are caused by changes in the kit; don't assume that changing your hifi is the best way to improve your enjoyment of music; don't feel obliged to give yourself regular retail based dopamine hits; if you make a decision, live with it yourself but dont feel obliged to justify it to others; enjoy the music- but if you stop enjoyign the music, at least consider going and doing something else until you start enjoying it again; accept that your hobby is just a hobby; remember that no one actually needs a really fancy hifi to appreciate music; be honest you just like hifi kit; live with it.
 
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