Some observations from a former skeptic - and a question

@mgrif104 Dual PHDs? Wow, that kid must really love school. In what? I teach in the Bschool on the UM-Dearborn campus, although I also have an appointment on the Ann Arbor campus where I live. Next time you come to town to visit her, schedule a little extra time and bring some cables. I'll provide the stereo, the beverage of your choice, and someone to swap power cords so we didn't know what we were listening to. It would be fun to see if we could hear a difference. 

I'm still a skeptic. As a professional consumer researcher, I know the only valid way to do these comparisons is through a blind listening test. I looked online and was only able to find one blind study on power cords for audio. It wasn't perfectly done, but it was pretty good. Sorry, I don't have time to go online and find it again. But I remember the conclusions clearly. 

The data revealed two things. First, power cables do not impact sound quality in any reliable way, even when listened to by serious audiophiles. Second, people listening are convinced that they hear differences. How can both these things be true? 

Here's an example. You have people listen to the same system playing the same song with two different power cables, and you repeat this several times. The first time they listen, they tell you that A sounds clearly better than B. But the next time they listen you flip a coin and either make A from round 1 A again in round 2, or you make A from round 1 B in round 2.  Then they listen again, same system, same song. This time they swear that one power cord sounds better than the other, but it's not the same cord they thought sounded better 5 minutes before. You can repeat this many times and determine that their preferences are, in fact, totally random. 

Neuroscience research shows that the brain plays a much more active role in constructing our sensory experiences than we normally think it does. In a famous series of experiments, it was shown that when people are told a bottle of wine is more expensive, it actually tastes better to them. It's not that they lie to try and look sophisticated. But brain scans reveal that they actually get a more enjoyable experience when they think the wine costs more. 

One other interesting outcome of the blind listening experiment on power cables. Even though the results showed that people's preferences were random, most people were convinced that they had heard an important difference. The placebo effect is very powerful. You probably do hear a difference. But it's not because of the power cables; it's because your brain is constructing that experience for you.

For fun, do try this at home. Get a bunch of friends together and do some blind random comparisons between your new power cable and your old one. Resist the temptation to cheat. Be sure you really don't have a clue which cable you are listening to.

Here is how to do it right. Lable one cable 'heads" and the other "tails". Have someone privately flip a coin and then, when only they can see, plug in the corresponding cord. Listen. Then have someone flip the coin again so only they can see. If it's heads twice in a row, that's fine, use the same cable twice in a row. After the second listening, have all the listeners privately write down if they liked the cable in the second listening the same amount, more, or less, than the cable in the first listening. Do this 10 times. Each time people compare the cable they just heard to the previous cable. be sure to obey the results of the coin toss. It's ok if at the end you have 7 heads and only 3 tails, or if you have 4 tails in a row, or whatever. Just obey the count toss. At the end, see if people dependably liked one more than the other. And just as importantly, when the same power cord was used twice in a row, could people tell that it was the same, or did they say the like one better than the other. If you do this, let us know the results. 

If you're interested in this sort of thing, you might enjoy this book https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031649822X/ref=x_gr_w_bb_glide_sin?ie=UTF8&tag=x_gr_w_bb_glide_sin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=031649822X&SubscriptionId=1MGPYB6YW3HWK55XCGG2

If the link does work, search on Amazon for The Things We Love: How Our Passions Connect Us and Make Us Who We Are. It goes into the science behind why we love music, among other things. I recommend it highly, but I'm biased because I wrote it.

Wow, that blew up a bit. I do sincerely apologize to anyone whom I offended or upset. I'm here to have fun, as I assume you are as well. It was not my intention to add stress to anybody's day.

@cleeds asks “What on earth are you researching that led you to this absolute belief that is so rigid you italicized it and put it in bold face?” Fair point. The font did come off as very shrill. To answer your question, I study why certain things sound, taste, look, or smell better than other; and how to conduct research on these issues. I come at this from a different background from many of you. I don't have the level of expertise in electronics or stereo equipment that many of you clearly do. But I do have other relevant areas of knowledge. Because of my background, I see this issue as part of a larger question about how the brain creates sensory experiences.

@mgrif104 (OP) “the differences in an a/b comparison were pretty easy to hear. No, it wasn’t a blind test but I will politely suggest that you would have heard a difference - it wasn’t difficult to perceive.”

I don't doubt that you heard a difference, and I expect you are correct that I would have heard a difference, too. That's where this all gets interesting. Scientists used to see the brain as being analogous to film in a camera. Your eyes or ears are the lens, and your brain is like the film; it produces a visual or auditory image that simply corresponds to the light waves or sound waves it receives. We now know that the brain plays a much more active role in constructing visual and auditory experiences. The brain works much more like a police sketch artist. What the witness tells to the sketch artist is incomplete information, but the sketch artist is able to render a picture of a person because the artist already knows what people tend to look like. Part of what the sketch artist draws is based on what the witness is saying about how the person looked. But part of what the sketch artist draws is based on the artist's knowledge about the world. Your brain does the same thing.

Visual perception provides a good example of this. Biologically, our eyes can only perceive detail in a very limited area they are looking directly at. In our peripheral vision, we can detect motion but not much else. If our visual experience of the world were simply a reproduction of what our eyes were telling our brain, we would see a little detailed patch where our eyes are looking and a big blur everywhere else. But that's not what we experience. We experience a very clear image across our whole visual field. This is because most of what we see is being constructed by our brain based on the last thing it saw when it was looking in that direction. Magicians sometimes take advantage of this fact in their tricks by doing things in people's visual blind spots that the person can't see.

How does that apply to the case in point? It makes a big difference in our understanding of how biases in perception work. In our old understanding of the brain, the chain of events would have looked like this:

The stereo creates sound waves => they hit your ears => your brain creates a subjective experience of sound => you create a judgment about whether you like this sound and that judgment can be influenced by the confirmation bias and other similar biases.

In our current scientific understanding, the process looks like this:

The stereo creates sound waves => they hit your ears => your brain uses (a) these sound waves, (b) what will make you fit in socially with the people around you, (c) what will bring you social status, (d) what you think you’ll hear [confirmation bias], and (e) it’s past experiences with music, to create what you hear. You then create a judgment about whether you like what you hear; in creating this judgment, you have a second chance to bias things again. The crucial difference is that the biases come both before our auditory experience and after them.

I believe that you did your best to avoid any biases that might have occurred after your auditory experience. You really did hear what you thought you heard. However, no human being can control the biases that occur in the brain as it formulates auditory experience. That's why I don't doubt that I also would have heard a difference. When I go stereo shopping, my brain is on autopilot, trying to create a smooth social interaction with the other people at the stereo shop. I also belong to an audiophile community where my status in that community is based on my ability to hear subtle differences in audio equipment. Even if I consciously think I don't care about my status in that community, my brain is evolutionarily programmed to care immensely about my status, and it will work on autopilot to try and “help me” in that regard.

To be clear, most of the time when we hear differences in audio equipment, our perceptions result from real differences and the sound waves created by that equipment. If I thought all differences in stereo equipment were bullshit, I wouldn't be wasting my time on this website. But I also know that some of the things I hear, that I really do hear, reflect the way my brain has created my auditory experience and don't reflect differences in the stereo equipment itself.

That's why, even though it might sound dogmatic or intolerant to some people when I say it, the only way to distinguish if the differences in what we hear are the result of differences in the stereo equipment is to do blind listening tests. As I said before, I've only been able to find one such blind listening test for power cables, and the results were strongly negative. But I'm open to other evidence. I don't have a predetermined belief that they can't make a difference. It just seems from the best evidence I've found that they don't.

This raises another good question: does it matter? If people really hear better sound quality from high-end power cables, does it matter that their auditory experience is being constructed by their brain and is not the result of the physical attributes of the power cables? (This relates to @cleeds spot on comment about New Coke.) I think an analogy to the placebo effect is warranted here. The placebo effect can be very powerful. Amazingly, a recent study has even shown that it can work when people know they are taking a placebo! If a placebo can help somebody, I say go for it. In a similar vein, if fancy power cables lead to a better musical experience, that's good, even if it's the audio version of a placebo effect. But I am troubled by how much these cables cost. One of the nice things about medical placebos is that they're incredibly cheap. If someone were charging $1000 per pill for a placebo, I would take issue with that.

@jji666 makes a very good point that it’s hard to do blind listening tests that last long enough to see what it’s like to live with a piece of equipment over time. This makes a good case for mixing blind listening with longer-term non-blind reviews. But I think blind listening should be part of the mix. And for the specific question of power cables, blind listening should be the first step. In my previous post, I explained how to do an informal do-it-yourself blind listening test. But the best way to do this is to have people repeatedly listen to three samples, 2 of which have the same power cord and the other one uses a different cord. Then you ask if they can identify the one that is different. Do this a lot of times. If they can’t identify the different cord more than 1/3 of the time, it’s just random chance and they can’t hear any difference. But if people can consistently pick out the different power cord, then we know there is a difference. At that point, we can do other types of listening to determine which power cord is better.

@ossicle2brain writes that I am “not open to doing the work.” Actually, I am. A full-scale study is more than I have time for. But I’d love to get together with people for an afternoon and to the best approximation of a blind listening test that we can muster. We could record the results and throw them up on YouTube.  I live in Ann Arbor MI. If you live in the area and are game, I think it would be fun.

Sorry for such a long post. That’s the danger of letting an academic talk about his work ;-)

@mgrif104  Very impressive. We're all proud nerds at our house too. I think the phrase "nerdy audiophile" may be redundant. 

Excellent idea about the audio shop. The audio dealer you are talking about is probably Paragon Sound.  I was in there a few months ago listening to their million-dollar rig, which sounded astonishing. He's offered to lend me some power cords to try at home. I think I'll take him up on his offer and do a little blind trial on my own. 

Something in my gut tells me that it's unwise to post me email here. Not sure why this would be any better, but I have a contact form on my speaking website 

https://brandlovecentral.com/contact/

If you send me a message there, I'll get it.