Just curious if positive reinforcement experiences have occurred for others, and how can you really tell?
Well, just thae fact that you are questioning it makes me think that it is probably not confirmation bias.
Is positive reinforcement why things are sounding better?
So I buy a nice amplifier and later I buy a nice preamplifier and then later I buy Nice speaker cables and each time things seem to improve nicely.
And then I buy telefunken 12ax7 nos tubes for a tube amplifier, and improved tonality, clarity and a tighter sound is what I get and it's very engaging (tubes are only a few days old). The cymbals seem to come through with more openness.
Things seem to be sounding pretty good and I'm saying to myself is it real or is it just positive reinforcement playing with my head? And the devil is telling me oh let's buy more NOS tubes for the rest of the amplifier. The effects of positive reinforcement can be very expensive.
Just curious if positive reinforcement experiences have occurred for others, and how can you really tell?
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Teles are great so at least that much is truth. Best way to check is to play some songs, then re-insert the previous component and replay. Still good? When you change something expecting or hoping for an improvement, be honest with yourself. Is it really better? Pros and cons? Do you want to compromise on the cons for the pros so you can stay with the new item? |
I would say it sounds like you have made good choices… because when you don’t you will know it. Early on I made a few bad choices… although I may not have known it on the first day. One of mine was I found out what grain was in the sound of a used preamplifier. It took about three days after buying it to hear it… I could not unhear it. I lost a lot on that one… but I immediately had to trade in. I always try to hedge my bets by always doing enormous amount of research and upgrading no less than 2x the investment. I don’t think I have been disappointed once I made sure I did both. One thing is that you learn about sound and your tastes and over time will likely make different decisions. Often early choices focus on detail and slam and latter decisions are made on different less easily perceived parameters. |
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If you hear difference it can be perceived as improvement (already mentioned). If you anticipate difference, it can result in bias to expect improvement (already mentioned). If you hear even slight increase in gain/volume, it can be perceived as improvement (mentioned elsewhere). What’s usually not mentioned: there’s a reason real research relies on controlled testing and sample sizes > 1. If other folks who can’t see what’s being used (only 1 factor changed per trial) aren’t able to predict reliably, you’re probably imagining any perceived difference. If you cannot see what’s being played and aren’t able to predict reliably, you’re definitely imagining any perceived difference. If either of those results fail to apply (i.e., properly controlled trial results are consistently predicted), you can perhaps reject your null assumption of “no difference” between… But most folks can’t be bothered with that level of rigor in their “testing,” feel convinced without real evidence, and profess their impressions as transferable realities. So ignorance can be contagious bliss. And it can also get pretty expensive. 😉 |
If your question is an earnest one, +1 @benanders If you're just looking for moral support, +1 @jeffseight |
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if you dont know and cannot interpret acoustically with the right set of concepts what you are hearing it is a mere change of S.Q. motivated by unknown factors or a bias to hear some change which we also inevitably project on the change phenomenon with no concepts to guide us consciously ...
Suppose you know your gear as an acoustic experience and suppose you know what parameters change you had done till the new piece of gear was added and their perceived results, for example timbre, bass, imaging, soundstage listener envelopment , sound source width , crosstalk , position , dynamics, reverberation time etc ; then when you add a co0mponent and install it in the right way, your body (not your ego ) remember the last S.Q. experience and can spot the change and interpret it as a feeling ...Your experienced ego will then come and think about the right concept to associate with the feeling but your ego must know the concept to begin with .😁 To verify what i am just claim : ask your old mother in law who never hear a stereo system "consciously" and in an educated way , ask her to describe the sound . She will say " this is good my dear" , what else could she said she had no concepts about sound parameters.😁
i just added silicone rings on the tubes of my preamplifier, my body/brain sensed immediately a change my experienced conscious ego interpreted FEW MINUTES LATER as a better imaging and a more detailed timbre effect without loosing the mids frequencies naturalness and with no loss in the bass and better highs frequencies . The ego is full of biases positive acquired once as in the journey learning curve or acquired as negative biases related to hope, branded name, suggestion , marketing and ignorance but if our body /brain was trained for such in acoustics experiments it will be able to felt a real change and we may be able to interpret it because we had learned how to listen our memory feeling engraved in our body piloted by the set of concepts we studied and we will need to interpret any experience ......😊 If we never acquired these associated feelings with acoustic parameters modifications, the only evident feeling felt would be conditioned negative biases or false positive one . This is why seasoned reviewers used to their room acoustic conditions or any acoustician know what he hear because it had felt it first and recognize which concepts he needs to interpret it ... This is my description of my own experience as i understand it ... We are not consumers passive conditioned dogs we can learn consciously using our own sense apparatus and body doing so ... You cannot build a system/room at optimal level accordingly to his design quality with only negative -placebo effects, suggestions , and price tags and random modifications only .. You need to train your hearing body with the controlled set of parameters in the three working mechanical,electrical and acoustical dimensions. Then you learned consciously learning also to hear your body reactions and then associate it with the right concepts . |
I have returned far more things than I have kept within my system and over many years. As @ghdprentice posted. You will know when you've made a bad choice on a piece of gear, cable or even tweak. |
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+1 @mahgister Before I built a properly soundproof listening room and then spending a couple years finding the proper acoustic treatments for it to sound good to my ears, no way was I able to accurately assess the values, positive or negative, of any piece of equipment. |
+1 @baylinor |
thanks! your testimony is very clear! You said it better than me and with few words...😊
This will help those who think that "tasting " the gear is the key... Or those who think that measuring the gear specs anew is the key ... We dont lack deluded people thinking acoustics concepts and parameters are secondary to gear price tags ...
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Well said. I tried to lie to myself about Be tweeters until I just...couldn't...take it.
That's not true for me. I don't actually know. I have a hold of a few preferences, but one of my experiences with hearing new systems is getting a new idea of how something can hang together beautifully. In this sense, hearing new audio systems is like traveling to new places -- you just can't conceive it until you go there. |
Confirmation biases has nothing to do with "lying to ourself" in particular or specifically ... «Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias,[a] or congeniality bias[2]) is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.[3] People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is insuperable for most people, but they can manage it, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills. »
For 40 years by acoustic ignorance i was comforted in the choice of speakers i made, by all i read, all i experienced , till the end when i sold them not because i was lying to myself but because i was ignorant of acoustics and the way to make them really shine at their optimal. ( which would had been like comparing day and night for ANY speakers anyway) My confirmation set of biases was born from all the reviews i read for 40 years confirming the Tannoy dual gold as top speakers AS IT IS plug and play... I did know nothing about acoustics optimization extraordinary tools . I was deluded by their reputation , price tags at the time (high end), and my limited knowledge and all others speakers i experienced put in a living room with no acoustics particular caution confirmed me in my biases...I felt good as i was comforted in my set of biases by time passing and by comparison ...
This is certainly mostly true because we know what are the parameters at play which must be put under controls for a specific speakers design to make it shine in a SPECIFIC ROOM ... A bookshelf is not a big magnepan for example... Once the right electrical, mechanical and acoustical working conditions are adressed we will had natural timbre and listener envelopment. In the window of possibility resulting from the gear pieces design choices and trade-off ... Only passive consumers will have no idea about what could be the optimal experience and how to make it possible for the chosen pieces of gear...
For sure if i travel as a tourist from one showroom to another i will never had any idea about how the next system will be and i will learn almost nothing because it is not me that played with the speakers/room parameters to improve them ... my tourism audiophile will only confirm my own biases i will call my tastes... 😊
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I bought a pair of NOS Mullard’s for my tube DAC that cost half what I paid for the DAC. I swap them out from time to time with some much cheaper NOS Telefunken Diamond mark’s. The Mullard’s sound significantly better to me. And the Tele’s sound way better than the stock new Sovtek’s the DAC came with. Sometimes you get what you pay for. |
I have Tube Rolled on a few occasions, where there has been a Selection of Valve Pairs to be evaluated. Tube Rolling is a Two Edge Sword, as change to an end sound, can be noticeably discernable. The change can stimulate a reaction, but does not necessarily create a betterment in sound for the end user, but a difference only. There are Tubes when demo'd as a type from a selection of types. that are capable of making a very good impression. Most demo's I have been party to, have been carried out as a group in attendance. Within the group, there is not always a unanimous agreement, on what is the better tube. With the differences of assessments known, it strongly suggests that recommendation may not be ideal for a end user. |
I walk into a certain big box store with a special high end audio room named after a tree in my front yard, I see some big name audiophile gear with impressive looking drivers and amps with big blue meters. I’m in a large rectangular room lined with speakers against the wall and a bare tile floor. I even see a pair of ML speakers pushed against the wall behind me. The salesman puts on some music. It sounds like a big boombox. The music is bleak and uninspiring. I’m dying just to move the speakers out from the wall. But If I am a young, impressionable and budding audiophile then my conclusion is this 6 figure gear is so not worth the money. I come to these forums and expound on my displeasure and distrust in the high end hifi community. Everything is either snake oil or confirmation bias. This so called hifi sound is a myth. We have so few audio stores left but at least the few that I have been in have good set-ups. Back a few decades, more audio stores than not had poor set-up. Only a few stores had a room with a high end set up to showcase one system vs. rooms with gear wrapped around the walls. But when you walk into a room with a good high end set up, be it a store or in someone’s home, you will know it. |
I formulated it incompletely to answered your post which is not even wrong,... Because lying is a possible result of the incoming confirmation related to our biases but not necessary part of the process. Confirmation biases do not begun with a lie , they begun by taking a road instead of another because each incoming steps taken confirm that we are right picking our stating point to begin with ...It is an objective process in ourselves once our biases set had selected a starting point ...And biases are not lies and they do not implied necessarily liying yo ourselves. it is a process that is undetectable at the beginning, picking a road because it fit us like a glove instead of another like someone who realizes, for example, that a favorable review of a product proves that he have made the right choice which is not always true because our biases can induce us in error... An error is not a lie. If you reduce confirmation biases to liying to ourselves , you are not even wrong , because at the end of a process we may effectively begun to lie to ourselves before realizing we have taken the wrong starting point to accommodate us at the times and then refusing to admit that we had taken the wrong road ...Then lies may be implicated at the end of the process but cannot be used to give a definition of the process itself... I know that you know that ... As in a marriage for example , we lie to ourselves at the beginning (if it is a confirmation bias ) not at the end generally even in this totally psychological situation ...😁😊 but the choice of an audio product do not begun generally with a lie to ourselves if we mean to speak about biases, which we cannot eliminate anyway because it is in most case the starting point , and the process of confirmation all along the road linked to them . Biases are not lies, biases can even be positive and in spite of that inducing us on the wrong road.. We can become conscious of our biases. Refusing to taken into account our biases when and once they become conscious is then lying to ourselves.
Then when you said ,it does obviously, you proposed to define the possible end result of an objective psychological process road to be a mere lying process , this is an erroneous definition as the wikipedia definition demonstrate it evidently ... You are probably a good corrector but a way less good thinker...
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Careful, @hilde45 , you are heading down the road to crazy-town. |
«Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises
https://pages.ucsd.edu/~mckenzie/nickersonConfirmationBias.pdf
It is here for all to read that conflating confirmation biases with lying is reducing a complex process to a simplistic process and conflating the concept of biases with the concept of lies...
i post this for the benefit of all. I dont hopen or think the harassing idiot who trail me in all threads is in a state making him able to any understanding ... This biases in me is confirmed by his behaviour and inhability to ever provide any argument against my post... He troll me because of blinding hate or complete stupidity or a mix of the two ..😊 |
Actually, @mahgister , I do not "trail you in all threads." I try to avoid you. It just so happens that I commented in this thread prior to your rambling diatribes, so maybe you are trailing me? |
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I feel like I’m caught in the middle of something here. Maybe I’m biased but I like the sound of Wilson speakers over other brands. I confirmed that by listening to other brands. Therefore, I bought Wilson speakers. Would it not be illogical to buy a speaker that I did not like to hear? Or does confirmation bias drive me to upgrade to more expensive Wilson speakers? I do feel that urge from time to time. “If a little is good, then a lot is better.” I don’t know who said that but it should not be words to live by. Although it is difficult to avoid in practice. |
@mahgister , alluding to that particular thread: Audiogon Management sent me my invitation via certified mail; they did not provide a list of everyone else who they invited, so if the invitation you received was in the same format as mine was, you would not have known that I was also on the list. And you are mistaken; the only two (quite short) posts that I made as I was following that debacle were not intended to be the least bit sarcastic--I was serious. To the topic of this thread: confirmation bias, as it relates to audio, involves telling one’s self that one is hearing something that one is not actually hearing. Basically lying to one’s self.
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Not if for the dungeon room?
Expectation bias is a root for favoring name brands, and confirmation bias can be an important subset of it. My impression has been it’s easy and reasonable to like something that sounds good to you, and it’s also easy but potentially unreasonable for that to morph into anticipation of more-More-MORE goodness from similar-but-maybe-better alternatives. Bias be aware, bias - beware.
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But I didn‘t know Wilson speakers existed until I heard a pair. I had no expectation bias but once I heard them I wanted a pair. It took me 27 years to finally work up the nerve to spend that much on a pair of speakers. And over that period of time I never found another speaker that I liked better- or liked enough to buy in place of the speaker I wanted. I agree that once I decided to buy my speakers, expectation bias continues to urge me to upgrade to one of their more expensive models. But that is counterbalanced by, 1) Lack of desire to actually change speakers- a lot of effort, time and money, 2) Spending priorities such as needing to eat, and 3) Risk of disappointment that a change will not meet expectations. |
@tonywinga , I don't think anyone is trying to say that all percieved sonic improvements are a result of confirmation bias. |