One of the things that should be taken into account in the evaluation of audio equipment, tweaks, etc is the Placebo Effect.
In the medical world, Placebos (open label or concealed) appear to mostly work on subjective symptoms, such as pain. They don’t work on an objective symptom — something a doctor could see or diagnose, such as a fracture on a bone. Placebos don’t shrink tumors, they don’t change your diabetes, and they’re not going to actually lower your blood pressure for more than 15 minutes, Basically, placebos appear to work on things that pass through the brain’s perceptual systems — where they can prompt thereleaseof opioids and other endorphins (chemicals that reduce pain) in the brain. Bottom line, placebos can result in perceived improvement even where no actual improvement exists.
The same applies to our hobby. Probably too often, we sense improvement in SQ because of the Placebo Effect. Our money spent, hardware bias's, effective marketing, or being influenced by the experience of others (regardless if true), often have us believe that we have obtained improvements that don't really exist. This is not necessarily a bad thing because a perceived improvement, whether real or imagined is still an improvement to the listener. This may explain part of why certain "improvements" can't be measured.
"The research group, led by Professor Anders Fridberger, previously discovered that the tectorial membrane functions as a reservoir for calcium ions, which are needed for the hair cells to convert the sound-evoked vibrations into nerve signals. The researchers followed the motion of the calcium ions in the ducts, and their results suggest that the calcium ions flow through the ducts to the hair cells. This may explain how the hair cells obtain the large amounts of calcium ions needed for their function. The study has also shown that the stereocilia on the inner and outer hair cells are bent by the tectorial membrane in similar ways. The next step of the research will be to understand in more detail how the calcium ions are transported, and identify the protein or proteins that make up the newly discovered calcium ducts.
"Our results allow us to describe a mechanism for how hearing functions, that is incompatible with the model that has been accepted for more than fifty years. The classic illustrations in the textbooks showing the hearing organ and how it functions must be updated. The mathematical models used in research to study hearing should also be updated to include these new findings," says Pierre Hakizimana.
New information about how hearing functions may eventually contribute to the development of cochlear implants, hearing aids that are inserted into the cochlea and use electrical stimulation to restore hearing for children and adults.
"Cochlear implants are an amazing solution for treating hearing loss, but they can be improved. A deeper understanding of how the inner haircells are stimulated by sounds is important to optimize how cochlear implants stimulate the auditory nerve," says Pierre Hakizimana."
~~~~~~~~~~~ Where this sort of revelation goes on and on and on, if one bothers to do the legwork of what science actually requires... if they want to get into the weeds of what we hear, how we hear, what audio reproduction means, how to improve it, what audiophiles say they hear, what the limitations of measurement are, and so on.
It is a MASSIVE subject, with complex unknowns and knowns that have deep complexities and aren’t really capable of being resolved as those ’knowns’ are deeply colored and shifting about due to their connectivity to the unknowns.
Science says one can’t declare it all being placebo... as that would be an emotional decision with limited depth and would be wholly anti science and more political and a personal internal struggle involving limitations of the given individual self... which is then selfishly writ large upon the outer world.
Interesting post. Just a quick question for clarification. You write,
"Bottom line, placebos can result in perceived improvement even where no actual improvement exists."
Since perception (and pain, of course) is strongly associated with physical mechanisms, then a placebo must be doing something to those mechanisms, correct?
If that’s right -- and it seems it must be -- then "perceived improvement" is "actual improvement" it’s just not "longterm improvement."
This seems like a trivial point upon which to ask for clarification, but it’s important to recognize that there is nothing "subjective" at work in placebos. They do have effects, and those effects have physiological concomitants, it’s just that their effects do not indicate they’re addressing underlying mechanisms which, if addressed, could have longer term affects which would be perceptible as well.
You stated that placebo effect last about 15 minutes and that something objectively obvious needn't involve it.
I've pointed out before that placebos, in medicine, work only for so long as the manifest reasons will always assert themselves, and for that reason, is a lousy analogy to use in audio.
Hearing something amiss is no less a way to ascertain something as seeing something is. It's just the use of another sense. Parlor tricks can fool anyone but after a good listening to cues you are familiar with, you can tell the difference.
The whole purpose of these tests that amateurs require intentionally omits the way one familiarizes oneself with something by hastening the sampling rate. Like I said, it's a parlor trick that can reduce any certainty to no better than that of a coin toss. But they get to say it's all sciencey.
The same superficial mind ask for blindtest and allege for placebo about anything....Then accuse audiophiles to refuse blindtest... i love blindtest, organize one near my city i will go..... It is an educational show.... Nothing less, nothing more, save for superficial brain....i dont need blindtest in my assessing experiments amounting to hundred CUMULATIVE small changes....."blackbox" single experiments are enough....
No piano tuner need blindtest....With your own audio system you are the tuner....Let some idiot figure it out with scientism...
We all know audio reproduction is outside known physics and human audibility limits. To think silly things like placebo effect or confirmation bias could remotely apply to humans in their den of audio tweaks is outlandish not to mention those crazy ABX or DB tests being relevant for anything other than testing mayonnaise.
We all know audio reproduction is outside known physics and human audibility limits. To think silly things like placebo effect or confirmation bias could remotely apply to humans in their den of audio tweaks is outlandish not to mention those crazy ABX or DB tests being relevant for anything other than testing mayonnaise.
You always miss the point and then sarcastingly accuse all set of audiophiles to refuse to play the game of blindtest and refuse placebo effect...easy strawman argument....
Do you think that i think that placebo dont play for me in all my listening experiments? They do, saying otherwise and putting your words in my mouth is the perpetual strawman argument where you confine yourself in a false STATIC dichotomy between what is subjective and what is not....
But placebo live at the borderline frontier between audible and inaudible.... Only fool can explain with placebo, most effects "sustained", very audible change, in time tough.... Are you one?
And are you like those wo dont trust their own ears to the point refusing ANY listening experiments of their own in case they could be deluded by placebo ? Are you afraid of your own mother? Because placebo is the MOTHER of all perception by the way....
Science is not something from a comic book resembling a war between subjectivist and objectivist, it is a bit more complex and less stupid than these "cultist" distinction like in scientology between those who are "clear" and those who are not....With a "blindtest" two separate the to in an "audit"....
Dont need blindtest for my culinary experiment either , and for my contemplation of the "illusive" rainbow.....
Some here seem to forget how on another recent thread, there was an actual explanation and account of how real testing is done by someone who does it for a living.
The testing that is always harked on these threads is not considered a test methodology.
Maybe Gore Vidal was right when he called this country the United States of Amnesia.
Or maybe Goebbels was right when he proffered that the Big Lie, said often enough, can become conventional wisdom.
Or maybe, if we all clap long and loud enough, Tinker Bell can come back to life.
It’s funny, I was thinking arguments denying the effect of bias in hearing reminds me of creationists denying evolution and low and behold as if sent from heaven here’s C. S Lewis tossed into the fray. I retreat to my trench.
Like usual superficial thinker equate Darwin with the late Darwinian materialist interpretation and they equate C.S. Lewis with the late cultist bible belt interpretation...
But sorry one cannot ever look for science in a comic book....
And today confirming the prescient criticism about "scientism" of Lewis, now we are there, with transhumanism cult and tyranny in Google and behind some big corporations more powerful than states...
There is no "SCIENCE" at the singular, except for cultist , like there is no WORD of GOD at the singular except for cultist....
There is sciences in the plural, and many inspired spiritual texts coming from all cultures in the plural ...
Sciences are not reason, only a part of it....Religions are not completely irrational, only a part of them in each one of them....
Read Cassirer to know what science is and what other cultural forms are..... After that try Goethe....This will correct Newtonian view of science without being obliged to immerse yourself in quantum mechanics interpretations...
By the way Newton was too much intelligent to be a newtonian only....
The film on Gore Vidal (The United States Of Amnesia) is fantastic! I was a watcher of Firing Line, the PBS show hosted by William F. Buckley. Bill and Gore---a regular guest---really got into it, usually on an intellectual level, sometimes more personal. Both brilliant and very educated, but polar opposites in political philosophy.
The film on Gore Vidal (The United States Of Amnesia) is fantastic! I was a watcher of Firing Line, the PBS show hosted by William F. Buckley. Bill and Gore---a regular guest---really got into it, usually on an intellectual level, sometimes more personal. Both brilliant and very educated, but polar opposites in political philosophy.
Thanks from my soul i just begin to watch it....
I read 2 novels of Vidal....Great mind....I never catch anything he say being stupid, or even completely wrong... i invite you to listen to his discussion without compromise with "the repulsive dark Vador brain" of Roy Cohn, the "grey matter" behind Trump void and behind McCarthism communist paranoia .... It is on youtube and you will understand Trump methods completely...
He has a heart behind his mind....And he was too singular to be a sheep in any crowds....Peace to him and he loved his country enough to criticize it....
If placebo effect exist in audio, then it works both ways. If you strongly believe that cables have no effect on sound then you won't hear the difference in double blind testing - negative placebo effect.
I know that when I first compared more cables, I did not want to like them because I didn't want to buy them...no one buys stuff they can't return or resell for cost...maybe need to watch out for reverse placebo effect...
If placebo effect exist in audio, then it works both ways. If you strongly believe that cables have no effect on sound then you won't hear the difference in double blind testing - negative placebo effect.
Yes, of course I'd never say otherwise. I understand bias affects us all to deny it is silly.
Even more new science about the ear and the brain ---coming in, just today.
What it says is ’we still don’t know how this ear/brain thing works’.
And someone wants to say that ’blind testing is king?’
That’s it’s all charlatans and palcebo, our imaginations?
that we have to submit to the just the electrical measurements being the arbiter of all things heard?
Are you kidding me? To point, we still don’t know exactly how we hear, or how well we hear, and that there are variations in hearing quality and capcities that equal the range of intelligence between individuals. Meaning ... the range can be as high as 1 million to 1 (as compared to the human IQ range, re cognitive capacity but especially cognitive SPEED, or rate, over time....) You can test the below thing on yourself easily. One pair of cheap foam earplugs. ride the bus or drive your car downtown and then get out at the mall or a big station, etc, and then in the middle of that space (union square, times square, etc)...remove the earplugs. You will feel your hearing sort out the noise from signal. you will feel it cut out the subsonics of your heartbeat, and the rush of blood in your veins, and so on. It will remove the thrum of air conditioning, buses driving by, subways, and other subsonics. You will feel it tune out that noise and tune in to just the sounds that are relevant to you. What happened is that your hearing shut down and relaxed it’s processing and filters, as you walked around with the ear plugs in (10-20 minutes). Your hearing mechanism will assume the correct filtering scenarios over the course of 1.5- to 3 seconds, after you pull the earplugs out. You will literally be able to catch it, for some of you, the first time...consciously. Note that this is automatic, subconscious animal level stuff that is out of your explicit control. But that does not mean that you cannot concentrate and filter. You are sporting the most complex and capable computer known to humanity, and you tend to use it. all day. every day. moving muscles, operating your lungs, eyeballs, and so on. and, thank the gods, you can learn. some much much faster or slower than others and in different ways. so our individual hearing vs the next person is not even close to being the same in level of quality OR type/nature.
Essentially, if you can’t hear it or if I can’t hear it, that does not automatically mean that the next person can’t. Remember. as varied in capacities in the brain tied to their individual hearing as there is variation in intelligence. Most importantly, if you can’t hear all these things audiophiles speak about, you DEFINITELY don’t get to design or demand any tests or regimen. It should be obvious as to the why of it. If it is still not obvious... then the idea of you being excluded from enforcing or deciding or demanding test regimen and type is REALLY way off the end off the limbs and out in the weeds of foolishness and incapacity.
Conducting a discussion in a noisy place can be challenging when other conversations and background noises interfere with our ability to focus attention on our conversation partner. How the brain deals with the abundance of sounds in our environments, and prioritizes among them, has been a topic of debate among cognitive neuroscientists for many decades.
Often referred to as the "Cocktail Party Problem," its central question focuses on whether we can absorb information from a few speakers in parallel, or whether we are limited to understanding speech from only one speaker at a time.
One reason this question is difficult to answer is that attention is an internal state not directly accessible to researchers. By measuring the brain activity of listeners as they attempt to focus attention on a single speaker and ignore a task-irrelevant one, we can gain insight into the internal operations of attention and how these competing speech stimuli are represented and processed by the brain.
In a study recently published in the journal eLife, researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University set out to explore whether words and phrases are identified linguistically or just represented in the brain as "acoustic noise," with no further linguistic processing applied.
"Answering this question helps us better understand the capacity and limitations of the human speech-processing system. It also gives insight into how attention helps us deal with the multitude of stimuli in our environments—helping to focus primarily on the task-at-hand, while also monitoring what is happening around us," says Dr. Elana Zion Golumbic, of Bar-Ilan University’s Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who led the study.
Zion Golumbic and team measured brain activity of human listeners as they listened to two speech stimuli, each presented to a different ear. Participants were instructed to focus their attention on the content of one speaker, and to ignore the other.
The researchers found evidence that the so-called unattended speech, generated from background conversations and noise, is processed at both acoustic and linguistic levels, with responses observed in auditory and language-related areas of the brain.
Additionally, they found that the brain response to the attended speaker in language-related brain regions was stronger when it "competed" with other speech (in comparison to non-speech competition). This suggests that the two speech-inputs compete for the same processing resources, which may underlie the increased listening effort required for staying focused when many people talk at once.
~~~~~~
So... you want people to be forced to deal with blind testing and science has just shown that they have no idea what the F* we are testing for (FOR DECADES!!), and that they have no access to the primary mechanism and it can’t be measured except via people listening and reporting back.
Oh yeah...the big central thing in science that the measurement people have real problems with.
Observation. In science, OBSERVATION IS KING. It starts with ’I observe’, and goes from there.
I observe. I hear something. (Or hear an absence of).
So, you’ve got a component to the test that you can’t put a number on, and you can’t get rid of it by saying that if ’it can’t be measured, it can’t be real.’
To try to force that on the complex equation would literally equate with a form of insolent self forced retardation of the most blinkered kind...and to make everyone else conform to those demands.. a blinkering of the self or an incapacity to reach the complexity of the question at hand.
where one would invalidate themselves from being involved in the question, at all. Simply by opening one’s mouth and making blind testing demands and to be saying that numbers are all that counts.
What insanity.... and that’s audio science review and audioholics, in a nutshell.
Bent and distorted with inherent limitations which are grossly visible to all who can see...
And for the love of god, please grow up enough to keep it to yourselves. Thank you.
Uh, that was a very nice rant but this isn’t about measurements and observations are often deceiving.
dear djones this post was not a rant, like my post is with you now, this was about new hearing discovery....An informative post, different than my ranting post with you or your ranting post against "hearing confidence"....
And no, you are right it was not about measurements because all in audio is not about these necessary and promising but sometimes "deceiving" or successful mesurements ....
And sorry, but saying that "observations are often deceiving" is like saying erection are not always successful....Or saying that the ketchup bottle is often not tightly closed....
It is not a good punchline....It is plain common place in a boring conversation....
Most of it was a rant. The rest wasn't really all that new but more information on the cocktail party problem. I did find the article interesting mainly because the way they moved a step closer was a focus on brain MEASUREMENTS from fMRIs where speech is localized in the brain. What that has to do with the placebo effect I have no idea.
I was reading one of these articles about placebo effect. Having been told by authoritative sources what a great article it is I of course learned a great deal from it. Until later when I realized the article itself suffered from the placebo effect. So now I read about a dozen articles at random, on random subjects, so as to avoid this harmful effect. The best method I have come up with so far is to read them blind. Wearing a blindfold totally eliminates all placebo effect from reading. Also eliminates all content. Oh well. The important thing when pretending to be a serious audiophile is to overthink everything, preferably to the point your thinking becomes indistinguishable from mindlessness.
Most of it was a rant. The rest wasn’t really all that new but more information on the cocktail party problem. I did find the article interesting mainly because the way they moved a step closer was a focus on brain MEASUREMENTS from fMRIs where speech is localized in the brain. What that has to do with the placebo effect I have no idea.
Brain measurements means nothing without a CORRELATION with a perception if we speak about hearing...
And placebo effect is constitutive of perception, it is not only a deception like skeptic club scientism use it for a political agenda...Our brain wait with his own bias for a sound to be like he wanted it to be for specific need...Then the word "placebo" refer to complex phenomenon...
For example placebo must be eliminated ONLY for objective statistical testing by company which want to test a drug; BUT only a fool would want to eliminate placebo effects from the therapeutic....
It is the same thing for hearing evaluation by the brain.... It is called a learned bias....Like in speech recognition where the brain will correct reality or an unclear sets of soundspeech, some words spoken in some room for example, to deliver a better perception....
Tell the scientists the brain measurements mean nothing, not me, I didn't conduct the experiments. The main point was the ability to image the brain in order to understand the regions associated with the phenomenon. Without the instruments, measurements and science there would be no article.
Tell the scientists the brain measurements mean nothing, not me,
djones do you read my post? you distorted my sentence to fill your (.....) fill the blank with what you want.....
This is my COMPLETE sentence:
« Brain measurements means nothing without a CORRELATION with a perception if we speak about hearing...»
Then i expect apology from you for your mistake in citation, or perhaps it is not a mistake but a tactic ?
After that "mistake" citing my post, you go on repeating what i just said like if i was not saying it in the first place.... i called this a CORRELATION and for sure a correlation must be between brain measure and hearing phenomenon ...
The main point was the ability to image the brain in order to understand the regions associated with the phenomenon.
Finally you ended with the strawman usual fallacy of saying a common place evident fact erroneously SUGGESTING that i was refusing it....NOBODY REFUSE MEASUREMENTS....NOBODY REFUSE USEFUL TOOL....
IT IS NOT THE POINT...
THE POINT IS MEASUREMENTS ARE NOT ENOUGH.....they must be interpreted and they cannot be interpreted without a model but they cannot be used to successfully reduce hearing phenomenon to only one temporary model.... Map is not reality....
Psychoacoustic cannot be reduced to physical acoustic.... Even with an A.I. simulation.... Save for transhumanist cultist....
Spending $800 for magic beans and then explaining to your spouse, parents, trust fund manager, or conscience exactly why you keep falling for the magic bean grift, is not analogous to the placebo effect in a double blind study.
as a retired physician, I spent many years experiencing patients with subjective complaints that achieved relief with placebo. The phenomena is real, regardless how one wishes to explain it. AND if it gave the patient relief and, at the same time "did no harm", that is a positive result....in audio, if it pleases the listener, that is a positive result...one must decide if the money spent is "doing harm" , or not.....
This is a really interesting thread. As a Practicing Physician, I can definitely state that the Placebo effect is real. As an audiophile, I can say that in my case, I have experienced it. I have definitely had expectation bias, wanting to hear something that is a revelation, and then over time realizing that while the change made made things sound different, but not necessarily better. Perhaps the term Placebo Effect isn’t totally correct, because there has been an audible change to my ears, but the expectation bias confounds how I react to that change
Seems to me that we are confusing two separate things. As described above by mahler123, as concerns audio, if the perceived change is real it is obviously not due to Placebo Effect. Whether the change is an improvement or not is a subjective call and is a separate issue.
On a more mundane level, it seems to me that some listeners are simply reluctant to accept the simple fact that some are simply blessed with hearing that is more acute than that of others; or, have developed their hearing acuity by way of training or experience more so than others.
I believe that you eventually get to a place where there is no significant improvement unless you spend 10’s of thousands of dollars. You need to be real with yourself and ask is a 1% improvement really worth another several thousand dollar outlay, or is what you already have sufficient. I have removed myself from the merry go round and now just focus on attaining more lp’s, cd’s, and cassettes. I've spent at least 20k on my system, as much as a new vehicle. Some would say I am nuts, but some here have spent a lot more.
mahler has it correct: "I have definitely had expectation bias, wanting to hear something that is a revelation, and then over time realizing that while the change made made things sound different, but not necessarily better."
-That is exactly what tweeks, cables, etc. do. Then, as in evaluating any component in your system, YOU decide, over time, if it suits your needs and to your liking. I don't think the placebo effect is a correct description because we do the same type of evaluations with all the audio gear, amps, preamps, (tubes - solid state), sources and speakers.
First, I have to get MC’s last sentence out of my system because I can’t stop laughing long enough to type:
“The important thing when pretending to be a serious audiophile is to overthink everything, preferably to the point your thinking becomes indistinguishable from mindlessness.”
Bahahaha! Love that guy.
Ok, phew… One of the biggest challenges in all human thought is that we understand there is some kind of objective reality and that we can, in most cases, consistently measure it; and there’s also the subjective experience of that objective reality that our physical bodies construct, our consciousness experiences, and is very similar but not exactly the same from person to person.
Much of the history of philosophy and science is about trying to determine “where is the line” between the objective and the subjective. In fact, it’s safe to argue wars have been fought over this divide. Consider this thread! Thus the philosophical and scientific fields of Philosophy of Mind, Neuroscience and Behaviorism, and all that flows from them.
What does this mean? It means scientific methods do a good job, in most cases, of quantifying objective reality, but often aren’t able to quantify or describe subjective experience.
What does this mean practically? It means we live in a world where we’re forced to either live in tension between the objective and subjective, and do our best to reconcile that tension, or back ourselves into the limited, lopsided corner of one side or the other and enforce the idea that our side is somehow more “real” or offers a more “truthful” picture of reality.
So: Yes, some reported improvements from cables, fuses, vibration dampeners and such are likely placebo effects. And yes, some reported improvements are likely truly heard and experienced as real, permanent change by the listener.
This isn’t exactly news, if you know what I mean. But I certainly respect the OPs point about the placebo effect.
Finally, we’re not even close to the limits of scientific discovery, and arguing that today’s science has solved everything is like a caveman arguing the world is flat because it’s so obviously the case to him. Who knows what we will discover that becomes a measurable, objective basis for what people say they hear with fuses and BDR cones, etc?
Muon spin, anybody? Quantum entanglement? Oh, so it’s “proven” there’s no free energy available outside the four forces because we haven’t detected anything else yet? Start looking at the list of things the scientific method HASN’T solved and you’ll be amazed; it’s enormous. There’s so much ahead of us to discover!
This is the world we live in. What to choose? Back into some corner and fight, or live in the tension and strive to understand.
So: Yes, some reported improvements from cables, fuses, vibration dampeners and such are likely placebo effects
Which can be verified.
And yes, some reported improvements are likely truly heard and experienced as real, permanent change by the listener.
Which could also be verified using the same procedure used to verify the former.
To argue we haven't reached the limits of scientific discovery is far fetched in the context of the placebo effect. We aren't measuring the device but the perceived human response.
Nobody tune a piano with placebo effect....the tuning is a series of small incremental additive changes...
I have tuned my room in hundreds of change in a 2 months period and explaining everything with placebo is only possible by those who dont have developed any hearing experiments to help them...
They are like a boat without a rudder? Am i here or there? Why the ocean currents put me here and not there? Where did i travel ? Is my destination an illusion?
And because they are lost in the sea they think all boats they crossed are without rudder....
We are all susceptible to be lost at sea but not always without a compass, mine is acoustic control , control of vibration and control of the noise floor electrical level...No unreal change can fool you and stay long beside the real changes.... The two types of change exist at different level of existence and magnitude...
But changing arbitrarily what we think is a bad piece of gear and UPGRADING it, is often an illusion and a placebo effect at work.... Especially if we dont know how to embed our system in machanical, electrical and acoustical dimensions by ourself....When we are not ourself at the SOURCE of the change experimenting, we fool ourself with ready made costly sometimes illusory placebo change...
Stay away from cables or fuses upgrades especially in the first 7 years of your listening experiments.... 😁😊 They can induce the disease: placeno effect and chasing the tail or worst the moon...
Real change dont need test.... Because when the listener ITSELF is changed this is real most of the times.... When the listener interrogate himself this is unreal....He is not changed at all at this time but look and EXPECT for an external change that is unable and powerless to change him first, than this change is unable to exist by itself....
When the change is real, the sound affect the body by emotion and objective EXPLANABLE cause most of the times, coming from basic science; when it is an unreal change it trick the mind to doubt but is unable to fool the body.... It is the reason why most people upgrade without satisfaction.... They dont know where they go.....Listen not the ears of your mind, but to the body ears.... Experiment....Being in active experiment is very different than being a passive consumers....This is the way to determine how to learn where you must go.... Acoustic basic science can help here and could guide us...
Then, save for exceptional experiment unexplanable but very rare in usual audio life , appealing to unknown science fact is often illusory.... Most change are explanable....But not all for sure.... But the main one are simple based science fact.... Easy to verify....The unexplainable also exist and it is very stupid to think that none exist...It is very simple to EXPERIMENT....At no cost....
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