Placebo Effect...a good thing?


I'm just a beginner into the world of the high-end (19 year old EE student), but the more I learn about audio and the entire culture surrounding it, I get more and more confused of the goals around creating the "perfect" sound system. I'm not an idiot, and I know that no matter how close an approximation is to the original event, be it vinyl, SACD, CD, multi-channel, or whatever, it is still only going to be an approximation. So then why try to recreate the original event at all? My best guess, and belief, is to capture the "magic" of that event in your living room. I've been reading a lot of articles by various giants in the audio field, and there has been a lot of talk recently about "snake-oil" in the audio industry. That is, no one can tell the difference in a double-blind test between two similar componenets; their guesses will be no better than chance. The only real differences people hear are due to the Placebo Effect: their brains generate a response, perhaps truthful in their own minds, that two similar products have completely different sounds. My question is, is that a bad thing? My experience from this comes from a power cord dilemma. My father auditioned a power cord from JPS Labs for his CDP. After it had burned-in a little, he asked me to listen to the difference and see what I heard. At first listen, I heard less brightness in the treble, and an overall ease of presentation that was not there before. So he arranged a simple double-blind test. It stumped me. I chose the cheap power cord, although the differences to me were so slight, they were near irrelevant. We discussed it for a while, and he ended up buying the cord anyways. Why? Because HE ENJOYED the system more with it in than out. Maybe it didn't effect the sound. WHO CARES? The point of a stereo is to listen to music. If you buy a 15,000 dollar line stage and you listen to music 15 more minutes a day because of it, isn't that an improvement? That's why I laugh everytime someone makes fun of a "tubehead." "Extremely high even-order distortions" they say. If you listen to music more because of a purchase you made, then you made a good purchase. If you don't, you didn't. PERIOD. I just get a crack out of all this finger pointing. Tubes vs. solid state. Vinyl vs. CD. If you buy a turntable to break out all the LPs you have sitting in your closet, and find you prefer the sound of analogue to digital, GOOD FOR YOU. I delight in people enjoying music, be it through a $500,000 wacko system, or a $150 JVC boom box. And besides, it makes me feel good to have a nice looking set of cables tying up my system. They may not sound any better (which I think they do), but I DO listen to more music because of them. Just a thought.
hueske
Dbwl, I shot any chance of THAT excuse working after giving my Dad a few stock tips last year (buy high, sell low, or vice-versa? I get the two confused :). But maybe I can cram the guts of a Wadia 830 into the chassis of my old Kenwood CDP? "No mom, I'm just fixing it." HA! That'll be my latest greatest invention! Cheap looking, mass-market chassis slip-covers for all makes and models! I'll make your Levinson look like an Onkyo when she's around! K-Mart...here I come!
We may have recently lost some great posters at Audiogon, but if we can attract more like Hueske to contribute, we are well on our way to recovery.

I like the fact that his entire ABX and engineering ideas are peripheral to the importance of the music. Sounds like Hueske has already been severely bitten by the high end audio bug and will have a life long affair with it.

This is about the same time I was stricken, and that is a good thing. Any females that venture into your life should understand that it is part of the package they get. Saves a lot of time and fighting later on in life.
Agree with "You like the music" is the most important thing.
But I don't count on "blind test" at all. That's people try to convince others showing no bias to certain brands. But "blind test" at home make no sense to me, also an EE engineer.

We use our ears to hear and enjoy the music, it is "blind" anyway. Switching things without seeing it is sometime more a "brain game" than a real test. Then you get nervous, then you fatigue earlier, then you can't relax to tell how much you enjoy that music or not. Sometimes difference comes from not enough warming up or no difference from fatigue.

For me, I sit down for two hours for one component and go for the next one. If I am tired, will not continue and wait for next time. Why? my amp's take ~1 hour to get its
peak performance.

Since you are an engineer too, recommend you to read articles from real engineers, who really design a tube or ss amp. There are some "techinical" reasons why tube sounds different from ss. High power supply voltage, feedback, transformer output, ....
I found some good articles in old TAS, sorry don't remember which issues.
To put this in short, everything is in nonlinear. Especially when you drive your speaker loud, your amp+speaker are working in a large signal (& nonlinear) region. If you only test your amp in small signial test on spectrum analyzer, you can't get the whole picture of real situation during listening.
Unfortunately, nonlinear characterization is difficult and still needs young scientiest like you to work on it.
When you put on a dummy load to your cheap receiver and measure the spectrum, you get quite nice number out of it.
Even a low end receiver gives a better spec than lots of high end tube gear, especially analog amp turntable....
But remember, your speaker is a driver+crossover, and that is nowhere close to a dummy resistor load for tests.
A nice small sigal performance does not guarantee a nicer performance when you put it into real world, i.e. large signal and nonlinear world.
I am not saying those spec number are useless, just point out it might be misleading sometimes.
On the other end, digital equippment's spec is usually more revealing what it can do.
A 24 bit processer is better than 20 bit one with similar CKT.

Again "trust your ears"!!!
Albert, so true! I've always handled it the same way and with good success.
Good grief! If we keep getting engineers like Bluefin here, I may development a powerful new respect for the numbers guys. How nice to see someone refer to the tests as misleading and advise us to "trust your ears."

Audiogon is definitely on the rise again. I hope we may continue to see high quality posts as have been presented in the last few days. Rejoice Arnie.