cliveb wrote: > That isn't how placebos work. You don't get to consciously choose > whether you're going to give them a chance. They operate at a deep, > subconscious level in the mind. And to suggest that the placebo effect > works everywhere *except* audio is just silly.
It IS possible, though, to think of placebos in an audio context. Let's say that the objective of the study is to determine the extent to which audio reproduction can produce euphoria. This is similar to what one might do with some drugs, and certainly consistent with what some serious listeners aspire to. Let's say we want to test the hypothesis that higher bit rate leads to greater euphoria in the listener, relative to 16/44. A source musical track of high performance and technical quality is chosen, say at 24/192, and then converted to 16/44 and 24/96. Two "treatment conditions" are 24/96 and 24/192. The placebo is the "standard" quality, 16/44. You could also add other treatment conditions, say lower bitrate MP3s. Appropriate control of factors like incremental volume, quality of conversion, etc, could be done fairly easily. You'd want three (or more) separate groups of appropriately matched individuals (the groups should be as similar as possible). One group gets the placebo, and each of the other groups gets one of the treatment conditions. With an appropriate double-blind structure to the study, we can address the question "Do the treatment conditions produce more euphoria than standard CD quality?". One would want to control for illicit substances, of course. And have a reliable measure of euphoria. And have sufficiently large sample sizes to allow a reasonable possibility of statistical significance in the resuts. We would be very interested in the outcome. R. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ RonM's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17029 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=98249 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
