Jenks;151437 Wrote: > OK, here goes again. Brain burn in does not remotely explain it to me. > If I put a new component in place and it sounds hideous and unmusical > for a week or two, how come when I go to an audiophile mate's place and > listen to his (burned in) system it sounds great? How come my brain > doesn't need to burn in for his system but does with mine? And to all > you placebo lovers, do I somehow expect that the shiny new $5000 preamp > will sound like rubbish when I get it home? That certainly wasn't what > I was thinking when I flashed out my credit card. And do I somehow > expect my friend's system to sound good? I know you hate to think > there isn't anything you don't know about wires and electrons, but > that's a bit of a stretch don't you think?
Whether something sounds good could depend on what you ate for breakfast, whether the sun is shining, if the Republicans won the election, if there is some wax in your left ear.... it's not about "brain burn in" (although there are well-known adpatation effects in perception), it's simply that human beings are not very consistent, except in one aspect - we are very very very consistent and good at fooling ourselves. In particular we are extremely good at constructing explanations for our beliefs and perceptions in situations where those explanations are demonstrably false (there's an enormous literature in cognitive psychology on this, which I can point you to if you're interested). We also suffer from confirmation bias - once we have a theory in mind (such as "components burn in and improve over time") we remember events which support this theory, and forget those that do not, and so given random data our confidence in the theory grows. I suspect that's what's going on here... but in any case the only way to use our ears reliably is with properly conducted blind tests, because that's the only way to filter out all of these other factors. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29025 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
