Expectation Bias

[kumakuma]

57 minutes ago, kennyb123 said:

Imagine though what happens when an individual has never heard their own system do this.  Most healthy individuals will react to that by acknowledging to themselves that their system is in need of improvement.  

 

No.

 

The "healthy response" when hearing an extraordinary claim is not belief in the veracity of that claim. 

[kumakuma]

4 minutes ago, kennyb123 said:

No, because a healthy person doesn’t consider that claim to be extraordinary.  They’ve already heard enough with their own ears to know that it’s possible.  And since they are healthy, their mind is open, they are curious about it and want to know more.  That’s what normal looks like.

 

The openness that you describe isn't "normal" or "healthy". It is just how some people are wired. Doesn't make them any better or worse than others who are wired different.

 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openness-to-experience-the-gates-of-the-mind/

[kumakuma]

38 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Guess what? You as a consumer are in control - or should be - you decide what to use to assess the quality of some playback device - or do you prefer to be led around by someone pulling on the chain hooked to the ring through your nose?

 

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html

[kumakuma]

36 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Obviously, these so-called experts had never tried an Australian red ... when I visited France it was quite eye, er, palate opening to see how much watery rubbish was masquerading as wine - very quickly learned to buy the absolutely cheapest wine on the list; because paying 10 times as much gave you almost no improvement in the pretend, alcoholic beverage ...

 

[kumakuma]

10 hours ago, fas42 said:

So, what's 'magic' like, with no nasty "expectation bias" getting between you and the sound - this, just posted, which also uses that terrible word, "magic", pretty well nails it, ,

 

 

 

How do you know that the "magic" results that this person are real and not caused (at least partially) by expectation bias? 

[kumakuma]

34 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Adding distortion can be a tradeoff.   For example, if you start with vinyl with 'ticks and pops', you can add a box that basically hides those defects.   Adding that box creates 'distortion' against the signal, but improves the perceived quality.   This would be the same as a DolbyA/DBX/TelcomC4 NR system.   Adding 'boxes' doesn't always degrade quality.   Eventually, the result of the decoder project will technically 'add distortion', but actually remove distortion that has already been added -- even more than what was added by the processing used on almost every consumer recording.   "pure" recordings are available, but few and far between.

 

So, 'adding boxes that create distortion' don't always decrease quality, even though the signal is  technically  'distorted' in some sense.

 

 

 

 

 

I think dithering would be another example of adding something to a signal to improve perceived quality. 

[kumakuma]

33 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

What I find remarkable is how "magical" this expectation bias is - it solves everything! It always gets the results one wants, whether to prove that someone else was fooled by this powerful force to believe in something "that wasn't there", or to ensure that one has the 'just right' reaction to something new that one personally is exposed to. I'm a bit of a sad soul in this regard - I have constantly been unimpressed, or irritated by rigs that are quite magnificent in their appearance, etc ... it appears that the universe was unfair to me, and didn't deal out the correct amount of this magic juice in my system ... bummer, eh?

 

If someone visits a famous tourist spot, and reports that a) it indeed was spectacular, was worthy of the fuss made of it; or b) that it was a disaster, because it had so many other tourists crawling all over it, like flies - how many times does someone say, "You're a victim of expectation bias!"

 

No one is saying this.

 

Biases work both ways.

 

For example, your bias and preconceptions about "blingy" audio equipment undoubtedly causes you to perceive their sound quality in a certain way... regardless of whether you believe it or not.

[kumakuma]

7 minutes ago, MarkusBarkus said:

...even Microsoft sez: Most tasks can be accomplished with the help of a wizard. 😉 

 

Unfortunately our local "wizard of oz" has about as much substance as this one:

 

 

[kumakuma]

9 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

The absolute best, and most expensive, gear can get it very right - it was precisely such a combo that enticed me back into the audio game two decades ago; because it demonstrated that progress had been made. But just because they exist doesn't mean that it flows on to all setups of nominally similar worth - the awfulness of a high end rig making a mess of some recording is made that much worse, because you know how much money has been used to end up with such a bad outcome.

 

Yes, and the owner's perception of such equipment is going to be colored by the fact that they spent this money.

 

In fact, you've said on numerous occasions how surprised you are that such individuals can't hear flaws in their equipment that are obvious to you.

 

Clear proof in the existence of expectation bias!

[kumakuma]

48 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

The trouble with the concept of these great measuring devices, is that they are hopeless at separating out, and registering those qualities that the human hearing system is so sensitive to, that allow it to be able to tell its owner whether music coming from behind a curtain is the "real thing".

 

What are those qualities?

[kumakuma]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

As one example, the degradation caused by electrical noise and interference - which could originate from any part of the chain and external to the chain, from the surrounding environment. IME, this is worst offender, and requires scrupulous attention to detail to rid one's setup of these factors. But no-one currently "measures" this - as a result, a massive cottage industry has sprung up, producing useful, and useless - the snake oil category for those for whom they do nothing - tweaks and devices to mitigate these issues. All this could be done away with, if intelligent efforts are made to get numbers for these weaknesses.

 

So many high end systems literally stink from the blurring of the fine detail which is essential to convincing SQ - caused by this. Making them unlistenable. An effort to, yes, measure the level of the losses caused by this factor would great help improving the standard; because those who rely on metrics would have clear evidence as to what's going on.

 

I would agree that it's impossible to measure such a subjective and abstract quality as "blurring of the fine detail". 

[kumakuma]

2 hours ago, pkane2001 said:

 

This part is not hard to determine, even without scientific instruments. One must be willing, first, to entertain the idea that not everything that one hears might be real. Blind faith in one's ability to hear staggeringly small differences blinds one to the facts, unfortunately :)

 

Yes, people often forget that a critical part of the scientific method is a willingness to admit that you may be wrong about something and change your mind.

[kumakuma]

9 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

I see ... although, I recall there were some misguided astronomers who complained that the Hubble space telescope suffered from blurring of the fine detail, when first launched. And some foolish engineers were convinced that this was real, and  believed that they could understand the cause of this subjective appraisal. And even more foolishly, the government spent a fortune on a tweak, which expectation bias led astronomers to believe that it resolved the blurring; that it was no longer an issue.

 

Interesting how mass delusion can spread around, in all these fields,

 

The fact that there was disagreement over whether or not such blurring was occurring proves how unreliable such subjective criteria are.

[kumakuma]

28 minutes ago, danadam said:

I'm not sure there was any disagreement, but I also don't think that anyone argued based only on their subjective impressions. 

 

 

I was responding to the contents of Frank's post, not what actually happened.

 

I should have considered how memory is often colored by our biases and checked for myself. 👺

 

[kumakuma]

12 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

For somebody who claims to be on the side of science, you seem not to realise how silly what you just said is ... if you have a variety of CD players, as input to some system, one of which has the worst possible jitter characteristics you could imagine, and another one, is effectively perfect in this regard, and the others are in between - the goal would be to eliminate any audible differences, irrespective of which player was used. And to you, that is a "fake idea", .

 

After you finish your CD player project, I've got some 8-track, Betamax, and MS-DOS projects for you to work on... 

[kumakuma]

8 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

What's the pay rate?  ...

 

I won't charge you much.

[kumakuma]

32 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Thought experiment: you listen to a string quartet in a room; then put a soundproof barrier between them and you, put up a couple of microphones on their side at stereo speaker positions, send that signal to speakers on your side, and have them again play - I want the same experience, no more, no less.

 

 

No, you don't want that experience.

 

 

 

[kumakuma]

9 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

The brain most certainly does - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect. But it requires the playback system data to have sufficient integrity, so that the stream of music from the speakers constantly forms a coherent sound source. The brain hears, a) the sound data of the recording, b) any completely extraneous sounds in the listening space, and c) the reaction of the listening space to the sound data being projected into the room. It's quite easy to discard b), but c) could be the tricky one. IME, there's a quite sharp cutoff point, where the information in a) is able to dominate, and the brain can quite easily ignore c) ; the latter "doesn't make sense!", with good enough playback, and is rejected by the listening ear/brain as being irrelevant.

 

Frank,

 

I think things are a lot simpler than this.

 

Essentially, if something is bothering us on a conscious level while we are listening to music, we're not going to be able to lose ourselves into the music.

 

What this impediment to "the magic" is will vary greatly from person to person.

 

For you, it's "a lack of integrity" and "distortion".

 

For me, it's poor recording quality and certain types of music.

 

These things may not bother others, such as my daughter, who can enjoy music I consider to be absolute crap on the shitty sound system in her car.

 

Bottom line.

 

You've come up with an explanation for how your brain operates but I don't believe that it's a universal explanation of how everyone's brain operates.

[kumakuma]

16 minutes ago, botrytis said:

 

This is Frank's fault, he overthinks everything.

 

 

I think it's more a variation of Maslow's law of the instrument:

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

[kumakuma]

4 minutes ago, hopkins said:

 

I can predict Frank's next post: `if you don't like poor recording quality it's because your system is not competent." 😁

 

Unfortunately, you're probably right... 😭

[kumakuma]

41 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

The trouble here is, how does one evaluate "poor recording quality"?

 

 

Audible flaws in the recording that cause my attention to shift from the music to the recording. The most obvious would be the snap, crackle, pop of vinyl.

 

Quote

What I'm after is the sensation in the brain when you listen to the live music. As in, zero PA nonsense in the picture. Anyone who has no trouble distinguishing live music, from the reproduction of the same music event, I would suggest has a brain that is sensitive enough to the difference.

 

I enjoy both live music and music from my system equally well although both are quite different. I don't know what "PA nonsense" is but I suspect that it isn't something I want either.

[kumakuma]

23 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Okay, close to 24 hours since this was posted - and no posts responding ... this tells me everything I need to know, .

 

The Edifiers have gradually been pushed to a point where they are about 95% there; the illusion holds, depending on how happy the DVD player is, to within a foot or so ...

 

I can't speak for anyone else but I couldn't figure out what you were talking about or why it's a "trick".

 

Your explanation above doesn't help. What does "within a foot or so" mean? A foot to the left or right of the center of speakers?  

[kumakuma]

7 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

IME, these days, as soon as a musician, or musicians, enter a space they have to plug in a PA rig. Doesn't matter if that space is the size of a living room, they feel undressed if they don't have this 'crutch' in operation. Annoys me intensely, and I steer clear of anything where this is doing, the usual, far too much damage.

 

 

Something like this?

 

https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/how-to-set-up-a-pa-system/

 

I've only ever seen such equipment used when the instruments/venue require. Maybe it's an Australian thing...

[kumakuma]

18 minutes ago, fas42 said:

It means a foot directly in front of a left, or a right speaker. Further back, but directly in front of one of the speakers, that speaker is 'invisible'; the soundstage hangs above and behind the cabinet.

 

That's the trick? I want my money back!!!

[kumakuma]

4 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

The PA can be any size; but the main characteristic is that the liveness of the sound is completely killed; it becomes squashed, with the dynamics sucked out it, with plenty of distortion as seasoning.

 

Worst offender was Billy Joel's drummer doing a presentation of how he approached his craft; the drums naturally filled the room, but a stupid sound reinforcement setup then made a complete mess of what you were hearing.

 

Your example is an extreme situation that isn't particularly relevant.

 

The reality is that any band that contains non-acoustic instruments is going to need amplification, mixing, and speakers.