advertisement


placebo and its relation to 'hearing better'

placebo_blocker.png


This is the paper mentioned in the comic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4573548/

And the major finding of the study: The predisposition to respond to placebo treatment may be in part a stable heritable trait.

I doubt anyone would get money to study this, but it would be interesting to see if people who hear differences between, say, ethernet cables or mains cables vary genetically from those who don't.

Joe
 
I've always thought that often we seek to provide ourselves with approval, especially with large expenditures - even if the reality is that the expenditure doesn't really justify the result.

A great example of this is one of the car forums I'm on; a guy is building a collection of supercars and bought a McLaren Senna Carbon Edition for something like £1m. His honest feedback on it a week or so after it was delivered? It isn't worth the money. The build is shoddy in many places, the design of the front wheelarches results in stones and debris kicked up by the front tyres to strike the bodywork all the time.

Many of us fortunate to be in a position of buying a £1m McLaren would be doing everything we possibly could to justify that purchase, talking up the good stuff and glossing over any negative. This guy just tells it like it is; "So is it a good car? Yes but only in the occasional usage sense. Would I ever buy another one? No, but I will be keeping this one. Once again McLaren have churned out a Forza Motorsport/Nurburgring car that doesn’t really apply to real life. If you want a Senna, go buy a 600LT*."


For a long time I bought into all the cable guff etc but now I'm pretty much of the opinion that as long as it's a reasonable cable for sensible money then that'll do. When it comes to digital cables I'll buy the cheapest possible as it'll either work or it won't - and it certainly won't affect the sound (or picture). I think many audiophiles just run out of shit to upgrade and need to feed their hobby. I've no axe to grind either way - let well-off people spend silly money on stuff that makes no measurable difference to anything. They're not hurting anyone and their money goes into corp taxes, wages etc. All good, even if I privately think they're deluded.





*Note: he has one of these as well!
 
  • Like
Reactions: Joe
Placebo effect is part of the fun, no?
Spending an excessive amount of time and money on the kinds of tweaks and upgrades audible only to those with golden ears is pretty much how normal people define “audiophiles”.
Surely the point of a forum like this should be to encourage the exchange of first hand experiences of kit?
 
John Phillips said:
I am not disputing what you argue. But I would add that I observe that people have many different ways of enjoying this hobby. If they are pleased by changing cables and hearing a difference, however badly controlled the test in a scientific sense then why should they not enjoy and discuss the hobby that way?
Click to expand...

This is fine; however some of us want a forum dedicated to the goal of achieving better sound quality at home. Others want guidance on how best to spend their money in pursuit of that goal. Therefore if certain pieces of kit are both expensive and technically ineffective, learning to avoid them is valuable guidance.

Tim
 
..but that’s where the arguments start, people dismiss the practical experience of others as “technically ineffective” by reference to an engineering theory as opposed to a specific practical experience.
I want to read about other people’s positive and negative experiences and experiments, not their pet theories. I can then make my own private judgement as to the likelihood that a reported effect (or lack thereof) is placebo, exaggeration or system dependent.
 
Heckyman said:
I want to read about other people’s positive and negative experiences and experiments, not their pet theories. I can then make my own private judgement as to the likelihood that a reported effect (or lack thereof) is placebo, exaggeration or system dependent.
Click to expand...

Agree completely!
 
IMO certainty about each little piece in audio isn't feasible (even if it's possible in principle)

When possible I do double-blind tests. Even after a lot of experience it's surprising how "big differences" can suddenly become very hard or impossible to hear.

But this is not hard proof of inaudibility to me. Others and I have elaborated elsewhere. It is useful and educational though. Another point, when you consider audio is a very long chain of processes, transparency of each link isn't good enough. Inaudible errors can and do accumulate so better-than-transparent can actually help.

Personally I use a mix of sighted listening, blind listening, measurements and technical learning to decide what to do. It's highly likely I've got at least a few things wrong; it's a hobby ...

We can (and probably will!) argue the toss but for me this is about sensible world navigation, rather than abstract questions of what science could be able to prove.

I think a skeptical attitude is a good start, given the snake oil all around.
 
Having an electronics qualification (I have one) has no bearing on what you can hear when listening to music. Some insight into science may help, but we are still a very long way short of being able to measure what we can hear. Meanwhile, expectation bias can be simply overcome by not having any expectations - just listening. Sometimes a mod works, other times not. Do the mod, listen, undo it, listen again. There is no need to kid yourself if you are truly pursuing increased performance.

What I find is that a few of my audiophile friends and I agree very closely on what we are hearing whenever we listen to each other's systems. We are dead straight and honest with each other. That correlation quickly debunks any psychology over expectation bias, placebo or any other imagined effect.
 
I have tried tweaks that have made no difference or actually sounded worse. I have then heard significant improvements with other tweaks.

My expectation wasn't that some would work and others wouldn't.
 
MartinT said:
of being able to measure what we can hear. Meanwhile, expectation bias can be simply overcome by not having any expectations - just listening
Click to expand...

..and there’s the rub (as Shakespeare might have said in a cable thread). The technical term ‘expectation bias’ does not translate as it sounds as it would in non-technical language. The sort of biases you want to take out of ‘tests’ are many, varied and subconscious. Simply saying ‘I expected it to be worse but it was better therefore my assessment wasn’t biased’ doesn’t cut it. The fact that the item being tested was described as new or better or whatever is enough to cause a subconscious bias that no amount of consciously telling yourself it will be worse will stop from happening. The ‘test’ needs to be designed to stop that bias from affecting the results.

I wish it was otherwise, because instead of taking the best part of a year to design my final experiment (that sounds creepy - let’s say the last experiment I designed before being pushed into management!) I could simply have told my trialists that they wouldn’t see any difference in the scans they were assessing.
 
It does greatly depend on who you're trying to convince, if anyone. Peer review is a well-known tool, for instance, but when I'm assessing potential upgrades it's only for my own learning. As long as I keep an open mind then I learn something (whether positive or negative) about my own system.

If I were to set myself up as a formal reviewer I can see how my claims could be questioned and picked apart. However, what I do is write about my findings and expect the reader to try it (or something similar) for themselves. Just as when I read someone else's review. As long as it's not treated as life-or-death, which you might think some audiophiles do judging by the long and tedious arguments that ensue, then it's largely anecdotal and adds to the community experience.
 
If you are still convinced that you can 'keep an open mind' then you either didn't read the OP or didn't want to believe it...quite a closed minded approach I would suggest. One of the points of this research was to highlight the fact that you are not in control of what your mind is doing. IT is making you hear the things it has decided you want to hear based on a lifetime of bias, reading, learning, taste and etc. If you do ever get 100% control over your own thoughts, publish the 'how' and make several trillion in a week.
 
The research is to do with medical placebos. I am not for one minute suggesting we have 100% control over our thoughts and don't see where it might have been implied. Being open-minded is all relative but it is quite adequate for dealing with system upgrades and whether they are worthwhile or not.
 
MartinT said:
The research is to do with medical placebos. I am not for one minute suggesting we have 100% control over our thoughts and don't see where it might have been implied. Being open-minded is all relative but it is quite adequate for dealing with system upgrades and whether they are worthwhile or not.
Click to expand...

If you say so. All sounds to me like someone who has decided to shut a few educational doors in order to keep an easy and familiar pattern to his life, but why not. If it works for you etc. I found it interesting because I am very aware of 50 HiFi years littered with false impressions, gullible decisions, mistakes, good things and etc, and am quite determined to keep learning until I'm 90 (ish).Maybe this is blind alley, maybe not, but you won't know unless you walk down it and peer behind a few doors. I won't see you there:)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top