GaryB;176399 Wrote: > I think the difficulty I have with the whole double blind line of > argument is the assumption that on one's own there will be tendency to > hear differences because one has spent money on a tweak and one expects > to hear a difference. >
Gary, it's not like that - there's no such assumption. We don't understand these psychological effects well enough to be able to say why they occur or what you will think you hear. What we do know is that they do occur, and very often - when people are asked which of two identical things are better, they almost never say "these are identical", and almost always say "this one is better". Not only that they have very specific (and wrong, since in these controlled experiments the two are identical) reasons for why one is better. This is an established fact, but for some reason many people are very resistant to it. This particular tweak, and many others, is very hard to explain through physics. To accommodate it we would need either a very complicated and unlikely mechanism using known physics, or we would have to invoke something new and unknown. So we have two explanations for the same fact - one which we know is there, which has been confirmed again and again, and one which is very complicated and baroque or goes against centuries of accumulated knowledge. There's not much of a choice there, and so it isn't something interesting to investigage, because it's very easily explained with something boring and conventional. Let me give one example (I'm purposely making it extreme to illustrate the point). Imagine you're a scientist, and someone came to you and said, when I flip this switch on the wall of my living room, the lights go on. Then when I flip it back they go back off. I think it's because there are some aliens watching that switch, and when it's up they immediately fly down from their saucer and make the lights light up. Now obviously there's a simple, plausible explanation which doesn't involve aliens - but the alien one isn't impossible! So at that point do you go to the effort of investigating? To stretch the analogy a little further, suppose the person came back and said, look, my house doesn't have any electricity, so it can't have to do with that, but the light still goes on! That's the equivalent of a double-blind test result - it eliminates the obvious explanation, leaving room for something more interesting. Sorry for such a long post, but do you see my point? -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32301 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
