Nice term, Paul. Very impressive. Very scientific.
And original. Well, at least I’ve never seen it before so I’m going to claim it as my own.
Visual Confirmation Bias (VCB) is a variation on confirmation bias that postulates that your brain causes audio gear, particularly speakers, to sound the way they look.
I came up with this idea a week ago when I got my new (used) KEF LS50s. (Note: I’m sure that dozens of people have been talking about VCB for a hundred years. I’m not particularly interested in who preceded me but raising points like that is one of the reasons that this forum exists.)
I had read lots about the speaker and I was expecting accuracy and soundstage precision. Their rich, full sound surprised me. These were not adjectives that were usually attached to these speakers.
I’ve been obsessed with these speakers for the past week, reading about them constantly. I find myself most in agreement with The Absolute Sound, which described the speakers—just after they were released—as possessing a “prevailing sweetness, a harmonic saturation that lends it a dark, velvety overall character, and a bloom that is so pleasing that I began affectionately dubbing it the butterscotch sundae of small monitors.”
But in the years that followed, listener after listener reported a “hard” “bright” sound. And when I look at the speaker, those words make complete sense. A tiny metallic driver in a small box? They look tinny and bright so no wonder some people hear that.
My own strongest experience with VCB: Many years ago, on the pretense of looking for a CD player, I walked into Sound By Singer at its old 16th St. location. After just enough feigned interest, I asked the salesman to listen to something “really pornographic.”
Surprisingly, he was happy to take me into one of the listening rooms. The only specific piece of equipment I remember was a pair of Wilson Speakers. I don’t know which model but they were white and just over six feet tall. Each the size of a restaurant-grade refrigerator. They were somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000.
Then I settled into the listening chair as the salesman started turning stuff on. Preamp, monoblock, monoblock, God knows what else. I just remember him throwing switch after switch. I have to believe all that gear equaled the price of the speakers.
If ever a system should have disappeared, it was this one. If ever the music should have been revealed to me, it was now. But even with my eyes closed, all I could see—and all I could hear—were these huge speakers looming over me. They could not have been more present in my listening experience.
Visual confirmation bias kept me from enjoying the finest pair of speakers that I’ll probably ever hear. The phenomenon is not to be underestimated.
simple speakers are better, so no great loss. Big is not always the recipe and frequently illustrates this - across the entire large speaker spectrum of products. Effortless dynamics is not clarity, nor subtlety, soundstage, space, articulation, image height or depth of image, etc. In my opinion and experience there are fer better speakers than the big speakers of the high end world. So much so that I never go into those rooms at shows anymore. It’s the ass implants, breast implants, and collagen lips ’beauty’ end of the audio pool. Might sound like an odd thing to say, for a company that makes $25k IC's and $40k speaker cables, but it's true. There are better things to hear. There are exceptions, of course. I say that so everyone's favorite can somehow be exempt. :P
If you want to help out the LS 50’s try a small sealed sub, known for articulation and bass quality.
one 8"er sealed sub per side, is usually a good way to try.
Unfortunately, my apartment is so small there’s no room for a sub. Although maybe the bathroom . . .
Actually, I find that I get the best out of the LS50s by playing “Singles Going Steady” by The Buzzcocks LOUD. Or at “elevated SPLs” as some might put it.
Opening with “Orgasm Addict” it’s one hit after another. You won’t believe how the songs come back to you. This is the real sound of ‘77.
The running length of the first five songs of the first five songs: 2:00, 2:52, 2:16, 1:47, 2:39. Even the Ramones have to envy that.
My audio room look like an atrocious mess created by a mad scientist.... Nothing is beautiful....
No confirmation visual bias here....
But a sound that is better to my ears than anything i ever listen to in the past and better than many 5 or 6 figure system in bad room on youtube...
The secret : Controlling the mechanical,electrical and acoustical working dimensions.... The 3 embeddings of the system.... Keep the esthetic, i cannot afford his price anyway, i will keep my audio room and my out of this world S.Q. at peanuts costs...
Congrats to the OP for recognizing he is human! Lots of people with the disease of audiophilism are unable to recognize that their perception is subject to the human frailties of both conscious and unconscious bias.
It is very simple to decrease the power of these visual biases....
Dont upgrade anything before everything is well embedded...
Placebo effect and bias CANNOT explain anything in a real powerful incremental series of change or experience and experiments ... They play a role in small borderline changes....
Placebo dont explain miraculous cancer remission....
Biases dont transform my wife in the most beautiful woman in the world...
Perceiving is a learning experience and i am tired of those who associate it with surperhuman pretense....
Visual confirmation bias kept me from enjoying the finest pair of speakers that I’ll probably ever hear. The phenomenon is not to be underestimated.
If you say so. https://youtu.be/ilG8mzbHNNI?t=88 Not to cast doubt on your experience. If you say what you hear is so affected by what you see, happy to take your word for it. You’re not that good a listener. Fine. Don’t seem to be the only one. No argument here. Been saying that myself. For years.
But the phenomenon that should not be underestimated is projection. That is when you assume whatever you think or feel must be what is going on with everyone else. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Humans are not laboratory instruments. We do not hear or see like microphones and cameras. Electrical and/or mechanical impulses are routed into the brain, which is a veritable fun house of biases, pre-conceptions and distortions. That's why anorexics look in the mirror and think they are fat. Drummers will look at a particular drumkit and pronounce the sound as warm or fat or hard based on what they see before they ever play a note. But as to the Wilsons, I had the very same experience as you did. Probably about 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to listen to one of the top models set up with the best electronics and cables in the store and it was not for me. I thought the vocals were not as natural as my Harbeths and the speakers did not disappear at all. So maybe you didn't cheat yourself out of the greatest hifi experience of your life.
The most deceptive pair of speakers I've tried are Fritz's Carbon 7. They look like his other speakers -- like a simple box. But they disappeared unlike any other speaker I've tried. I like the tonality and character of my Salks better, but they don't disappear the way Fritz's did. They were very unusual in that regard.
Our vision is our most powerful sense, it modifies all the other senses and perceptual/conceptual functions of the brain and the rest of you. If I point a cocked and loaded 357 magnum at your head a plethora of things happens instantaneously; your blood pressure will shoot to 200/100, your pulse to 150, you will break out in a sweat and you will feel like you want to jump out of your skin. If I point a banana at your head nothing happens. All of this based on visual perception and learning what is and is not dangerous.
@millercarbon, and that is why you like Tekton Moab's. A man's got to know his limits.
A temporary condition that is eliminated with long term evaluation. Playing a wide selection of music over time eliminates any preconceived notions. Unless you are a slow learner, long term evaluation will show a loudspeakers strengths and weaknesses, you can only fool yourself for so long before reality overrides your initial impressions. Long term evaluation is the only way to learn what a system is delivering, and it's pretty much an industry standard.
A temporary condition that is eliminated with long term evaluation.
exactly...
Our vision is our most powerful sense, i
This is not true....Like usual you generalyze something out of his sphere to suit your opinion about biases...
The most powerful sense is hearing....
It is the last to go out...
It is the only one sense that link us to people around us in a coma...
In alzheimer patient it is music that ressuscitate them for a while not visual perception...
In the mother body you listen voices and music you do not see....
With sound we can see like bat or dolphins, some blind people demonstrate it easily; but with light we dont listen music or perceive sounds.... Save in exceptional synesthesia phenomenon where a sound is PASSIVELY associated with a color....But there is no ACTIVE concrete perception of sounds with light like perception of concrete forms with sound beam produced by a bat or a blind....
«OM is the original sound, before the universe OM is»- A rishi
«In the beginning is the logos»- in French we translate it by the word "verbe" like the english word "verb"....
Logos in greek is a very complex concept untranslatable in our languages, it means something unifying and transcending reality, language and thinking....It is an act....
«In the beginning was the act»- Goethe’s Faust....
We all have biases it doesn't matter how long you listen to something you simply grow accustomed to it and when some small change is made it's assumed the sound changes without using proper controls to account for our biases. Some here seem to think they're immune to this most basic human condition. They suffer from Anosognosia.
Nobody in his right mind can except himself from biases...
The problem is when some people with BLINDERS use biases to explain ALL incremental continuous changes in a set of experiment in acoustic control for example or with the many modifications possible about the audio gear...
Think a little more than few seconds please....Before insulting....
Our aural memory isn’t that good for anything but seconds or do we deny that as well.
It is only your blinders that make you to think and affirm that others deny anything about biases or aural memory... Precision about something and adding context is NOT a denegation of something true, save for limited opinionated spirits...
Aural memory has 2 level:
Sound :very short memory, melody for example: very long memory..
In language we forget the sound of the speech shortly NOT the meaning....
In listening music i remember my impression of the sound in my body/brain, it is an emotion associated with the sounds, not the sounds themselves...
We’re not talking about remembering melodies but frequencies
When we judge an audio system qualities, we listen to the instrument playing musical timbre, where melody and harmony one note after the other are the perceived phenomenon....
Timbre perception is not the perception of a passive external sound, it is the dynamical perception/interpretation of a concrete sound in a room, with a continous change of the fundamental frequencies and the spectral envelope...
This perceiving experience is associated with an emotion in the body and this is this emotion which we remember not the concrete sound in itself...
By the way we human listen NOT to abstract frequencies... We listen to TIMBRE.... You misjudged audio experience....You trust to much electronic design reading publicity.... Humans listen to TIMBRE, not pure frequencies in an anechoic chamber...Ears are not simplistic measuring electronic devices...
Visual confirmation bias are a common place fact in ALL human...
The problem come when dogmatic or simplistic minds use it to negate ALL experiences in audiophile listening...Or in any other human experience...
Adding a weighting factor to explain a phenomenon is one thing, reducing all the phenomenon to this factor is another thing....
i like oldhvymec , i see oldhvymec , i buy oldhvymec , but this does not reduce oldhvymec to be a figment of my imagination.... No more than the increase in S.Q. resulting from my experiments is ONLY a figment of my imagination reducible to my wishes...
By the way this oldhvymec cost only peanuts.... 😊 I recommend to all people to add one to his gear, a low cost tweak.... 😊
Actually ears are a type of simplistic listening device a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption. We listen to frequencies through this contraption and our mind cobbles together these sounds into something coherent at least to those that have grown accustomed to hearing them. Proper listening tests are nothing but one weighing factor some believe can’t tell us anything. The dogma is denying this phenomenon, the simplistic minds are those who believe what they hear without question.
Actually ears are a type of simplistic listening device a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption.
Sorry but it is too much work to replicate to that to someone who really think that this is a real description of this complex phenomenon... Borrow books...
the simplistic minds are those who believe what they hear without question. Report this
When a musician of an orchestra judge the playing timbre of an instrument modifying the compressive force of the strings he judge what he hear without question...
When i hear my speakers in my room producing a better violin timbre after some experiments playing with the dyssemetric compressing of the springs sets, i hear the result without question...
The musician and i are we simplistic minds for that? The musician has his own biases he prefer Guarneri to stradivarius, i prefer my Mission speakers to some other speakers.... Are we simplistic?
Misjudging people by sticking to a decreed opinion about biases, without willing to listen to ANY others experience is simplistic to say the least....
I wil not qualify the Rube Goldberg contraption metaphor and hearing otherwise than child explanation...
Anyone want to comment specifically on the LS50 and it’s supposed forward/bright sound?
All this talk of memory caused me to return to an earlier observation of mine: There seems to be no limit to the lyrics I can recall to songs that a) I haven’t heard for 20 years, and b) never liked in the first place. God knows that I’m not happy about it, but put on a song by The Captain And Tennille or England Dan And John Ford Coley and you’re sure to find me singing along, every ghastly word imprinted on some neuron somewhere in my head.
If I could figure out how to reprogram my brain and put the cells currently devoted to “Crocodile Rock” to more useful purposes, I could solve global warming. Do you suppose that’s Elon Musk’s trick?
If I could figure out how to reprogram my brain and put the cells currently devoted to “Crocodile Rock” to more useful purposes, I could solve global warming. Do you suppose that’s Elon Musk’s trick?
Crows are probably conscious said a german researcher this year...
Doctors have already observed after an examination for an alleged disease a university professor working well all his life without almost any cortex...
When we are out of the body, the thinking is more fast on all accounts by NDE experiencers and even by a materialist neurologist who died and change his materialism into spiritual awareness Eben Alexander....
Then....
It is not the allowance of the neurons to a task that make us conscious and more intelligent...By the way the neurons are only a gross scale of the working brain, the billions of microtubules in each neuron is another scale where the true non-algorithmic processes goes on after the research of Penrose and Hameroff...
The brain is only a limitating and adaptative tool to this world not the origin of the intelligence or information dynamics....
It is only my opinion for sure....but the research actually go in this direction....Not in the opposite direction, the dying materialism of the 19 century....
The forward bright sound of the LS50 is probably from people who have a room that’s had some acoustic treatment and is listening on axis, that speaker tilts upward in the 2.5K to 4K frequencies. For a warmer sound like you’re experiencing I will assume you haven’t bothered with first reflection treatments and perhaps don’t sit right in front of them. Just a guess.
If I could figure out how to reprogram my brain and put the cells currently devoted to “Crocodile Rock” to more useful purposes, I could solve global warming. Do you suppose that’s Elon Musk’s trick?
Imagine if you could harness the power of 'Seasons in the Sun'. Uhuhuhuh, I shudder at such thoughts......
"...Anyone want to comment specifically on the LS50 and it’s supposed forward/bright sound?..."
My LS50s are not bright. I have even tried them with supertweeters. That helped A LOT. I think they sound best with SS amps and maybe some volume to bring the top end up some. With mellow tube amps they are pretty flat sounding (meaning no jump factor).
Seasons In The Sun! Now THAT’S music! By? No googling.
Djones, you’re right on both counts. Believe me, there’s nothing I’d love more than an Eames easy chair planted right at the point of the triangle. But this apartment dictates that the couch go here, the table go there . . .
The apartment is functional, however, in the amusement it provides out-of-towners. “You pay HOW MUCH for rent? I have six bedrooms and a pool and a BMW for the same price!” Us New Yorkers love that conversation. Every time we have it.
John Updike wrote that New Yorkers share a belief that anyone living somewhere else is, on some level, kidding themselves. Count me among the believers.
Terry Jacks! I’m not familiar with his ouvre but I’m sure he never again reached such a height.
One of the good things about this apartment is the many windows. The LS50s are firing at four of them. But they’re covered by very nice, old-school wooden blinds that are quite adept at diffraction.
My biggest room problem is, if I’m sitting at my sonic strong seat, the point of first reflection is covered by two pieces of art, each covered in glass. Essentially, a 3x5 piece of glass. But is there anything to be done? Covering them with drapes would seem to defeat their purpose in life. Any ideas? Anything?
I wouldn’t do anything the first reflections help those speakers. Here’s a thread on the LS50 might give you some insight. Contrary to what you read here first reflections are not always bad, depends on your application in your case I wouldn’t worry about it unless you’re not happy with the sound.
Speaker placement is the most crucial. I get that everyone these days is trying to turn their listening room into a studio level reference response environment but I've always tried to adapt to the environment a best as possible. You can fully enjoy some Art Pepper in a brick wall apartment with lots of windows and reflections. I'm sure most would frown upon that statement if anyone actually reads it but it's true. Focus on the enjoyment. The quality of the gear is paramount as is speaker placement. Work with what you're workin with and smile..
By far the largest visual confirmation bias operates with women. We all believe the great-looking ones will be good at everything else and 99% of the time we are disappointed.
1% of the time we stick with it because she is simply irresistible.
There is also of course tactile confirmation bias, where the figures are more like 25%-75%.
If you believe you are immune from this effect, you can have your susceptibility demonstrated via a quick 1.5 minute youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM
That would certainly be relevant to the conversation if your speakers had mechanical mouths that formed words while playing music. Mine did not come with a word forming apparatus. Just drivers that go in and out. And tweeters that do whatever it is they do. Quite interesting, though.
@thecarpathian In that demonstration, a visual stimulus creates an expectation that alters your auditory perception. That is the conversation at it's most basic.
The "word-forming apparatus" creates the expectation and the ears follow. I could create the exact same effect by telling you before you hear the phrase that it's going to be "baa" or "faa." Now we have a different stimulus manipulating expectations (now social information/gossip/rumor), but the effect will be the same. Once the expectation is made, the ears will follow.
A lot of people want to argue that we can't hear differences between gear because we're susceptible to such effects, but that's clearly not the case. In the above example, you're not going to hear any word or phrase that the mouth makes, just ones that mostly conform the actual auditory stimulus that's impinging upon the senses.
If you believe you are immune from this effect, you can have your susceptibility demonstrated via a quick 1.5 minute youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM
Very interesting...
But we must remember that the processing of sound speech is a social interactive proximity phenomenon where the sound is totally associated with the mouth movement of the speaker at ALL time....Then the visual information associated with the PRESENCE of the person who speak dominate the isolated sound....
I am surprized but not so much if i think about it....The most important encompassing information dominate the secondary one and condition it ...
Very interesting.... The general fact that the multidimensional stack of information superseed the partial one is a universal phenomenon.......
A lot of people want to argue that we can’t hear differences between gear because we’re susceptible to such effects, but that’s clearly not the case.
Many people dont think.... They own an opinion and their process of thinking is a search to conform anything around this opinion.... The use of the "placebo" concept out of his medical context to explain an audio experiment is an illustration of this fact.... For sure we are all suggestible beings and thats play a role.... But using this fact to reduce anything that does not conform to our a priori opinion is not thinking very much nor experimenting either....
An example of this universal conditioning is the conditioned prejudice by the market practice that only an upgrading of gear will give to us a new better S.Q. Most dont even think about that problem, they throw their money without thinking about the way to embed in all his working dimensions their system in the first place... 😁
I know it and for the last 2 years i made experiments and discoveries each week....
My last discovery is astounding for me..... It is about acoustic working dimension controls...
So if I make my KEF LS50s look like the Genesis Prime, they are going to fool me into thinking I'm listening to the Genesis loudspeakers? I don't think so.
One thing I have learned, so many people here talking about how they hear through their eyes, explains a lot. Reminds me of something I heard myself once upon a time. It goes like this:
"Some learn through the eyes by seeing. Others learn through the ears by hearing. I learn through the mouth by talking."
Funny when a meager inexpensive looked down upon lowly speaker like the wharfedale diamond 225 can do pretty much 80 to 90 percent right. Amazingly so at a paltry $449 list. If I somehow ran into trouble and had to ditch my much more expensive speakers (imo) and be left to live with my diamond 225’s, I’d still be a happy camper.
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