Important Points
I have a problem, because I majored in psychology, with emphasis on the experimental side. I helped a professor do some original research on "subjective colors," colors induced by moving bands of black and white.
What I learned forty years ago has just been reinforced by recent research. People have an almost infinite capacity to see and hear things that aren't there.
To be fair, they also have the capacity to learn to see and hear things that are usually overlooked.
I say there's a light side and a dark side to this. the light side is that you can choose to listen to music, even when the source has defects. The dark side is you can train yourself to hear the defects and exaggerate their importance.
My personal opinion is that anything that can't be demonstrated by instruments and isn't obvious in double blind tests is so marginal that people would be happier and better off training themselves to ignore it.
This isn't a rant against striving for perfection. It's a rant against training oneself to be unhappy. You have a choice. You can pay attention to the good things in life or you can obsess over imperfections.
You can also choose to prefer scientific investigation to marketing hype. Open or disguised as reviews.
These are important things to discuss. When on the mission of attaining the best possible sound, it becomes easy to notice what is wrong and what you want to change, rather than appreciate what is good about a system. This can also occur when you have a friends system that you like a lot, and it does something different than what yours does. Or you make purchases based on what you can afford, and you believe that components up the food chain are inherently superior. You are priming yourself for dissatisfaction.
This happens to many "audiophiles" who view audio as a contest or a holy grail quest. Possibly some poeple have a predisposition to noticing what is not right, or they have they have a negative kant to their personality. Its easy to get into the trap that there is better than what you have. But on the other side of the coin, there usually is better out there, the question is can you afford it, do you even want it, or are you willing to sacrifice to get it. At what point do you become satisfied?
Part of the equation is the ability to be objective, which is a hard thing to do. Often we buy audio gear thinking its going to be better than what we have, and so our perceptions say it is. But if you can be objective, then you can make solid observations.
Case in point. I have formed the opinion that damping fluid, such as silicone, in a tone arm kills the dynamics and subtle nuances of the music. The leading edge of transients get blunted. My new tone arm has a cup for damping fluid that rests under the pivot point. I first set the arm up without fluid, which the builder recommends. But I had a slight mechanical mismatch between the arm and cartridge, the resonance frequency of the arm is low, and the cartridge is slightly to compliant. Ended up with footfall problems, due to this mismatch. I filled the cup to the recommended point and my footfall problems went away. But the music lost its dynamic contrasts,things became too smooth. Aha the evils of damping fluid! My opinions were validated right? Well I started to remove fluid in increments, till the point where it was on the edge of having footfall issues. Pretty happy with the results, no footfalls, and I believed I had the dynamic shadings of the music back. But to be sure, since it could be done, I completely removed the cup, and did an A/B versus the two configurations. Found out that yes the fluid still compromised dynamic contrasts a hair, but there were other benefits to it. I ended up preferring to have the cup in place with a minimal amount of fluid in it. Being objective allowed me to make the proper choice in set up.
In theory I agree with double blind testing. But in practice, I never see it run properly. The use of switch boxes obscures subtle differences, and no one seems to build a cost no object one that does proper impedance buffering in order to have a properly balanced test. Getting speakers in the right place for a listening room, and removing the unused pair never seems to get done either. A/B a turntable that uses the same cartridge, and a good one, and same tone arm doesn't happen. Its expensive and complicated to run a proper double blind test. Yet people who claim it needs to be done use it as a test for other people to prove their expensive component is superior to a cheaper one. Yet I never hear of them running the test as a means to choose their own components. The methodology of doing a double blind or even single blind is expensive and difficult.
But yes, having the proper mind set of being objective is paramount in evaluating audio equipment. Being introspective and understanding yourself and your biases and your preconceptions goes a long ways to getting value out of this hobby.
Regards
Mister Pig
:tresbon:
:dammit: