Hearing/believing
Reply #12 – 2013-03-12 14:26:38
To put it in simple terms, the companies probably promote their products with certain terms (clarity, presence, precision, etc.) and certain reviews in the audiophile press get read by most of the audiophile community, making certain ideas common. People may test products with their friends, and hear each other's reports too. Primed with certain expectations, they will focus on those aspects and hear them. If something supposedly bright sounds a little muddy, they'll maybe shift their position and with the effects of comb-filtering and similar room effects, the sound reaching their ears may indeed change physically. They then confirm their expectation and are pleased that they are discerning enough to hear what the golden-eared reviewer could hear. So it's a collection of ideas like psychological framing , expectation bias , confirmation bias & social proof . With all these added together in one test and with our sonic memory being so indistinct, it's a powerful psychological effect that is usually larger than any audible difference. But it's also non-random and the social proof aspect is especially likely to make us expect to hear what others have heard. We're all susceptible, even if we're aware of the effects. Oenophiles can be sold snake oil in the same way, as I was shocked to find in a company from whom I purchased some wine-glass racks, and offered for nearly £2000 a glass crystal stick you insert into your wine, complete with instructions for how to test it that would happily invoke all the biases necessary to believe it was responsible for giving the wine body and depth and finish, and developing it's maximum flavour potential. I seem to recall some pseudoscientific 'explanation' of the esoteric principles by which it claimed to work. Certain tricks can be played by sneaky experimenters (e.g. put a device with a 'mellow' reputation inside the shell of a device with a 'bright' reputation and vice-versa (or the same device in both) and some of these biases can be isolated). Careful ABX-minded people randomise it all away to isolate the effect of the device over a number of tests. (On the wine front, a number of experts began talking of tannins and red-wine words to describe white wine with red food colouring added in a test published a couple of years ago, while they used white wine descriptions for the uncoloured equivalent. I think they were kept anonymous as it was the psychology research that was most important.) With loudspeakers differences might be true and significant, of course, though room effects make a big difference and can cause tonal differences as your ears move around the space (comb filtering etc) making it hard to be consistent. There are also some audiophile tube amps that deliberately colour the sound and are non transparent. There are also some very well designed transparent and linear tube amps, though it's unlikely they are any better than far cheaper solid state amps (and their linearity is probably measured on solid-state test and measurement equipment without a thought).