Expectation Bias

[botrytis]

1 minute ago, kumakuma said:

 

What are those qualities?

 

Frank doesn't know. He assumes much, understands little. I do wish Frank well, but he is a bit too inside his head.

[fas42]

39 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

What are those qualities?

 

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.

[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". 

[fas42]

28 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

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

 

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,

[pkane2001]

10 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Wha?? I just said above that the brain is very good at picking 'fakes' - which is why when you stand right in front of a normal hifi going at a fair clip, you just laugh if someone asks if you're fooled - of course you're not! What matters is whether an illusion is manifested; anything else is just admiring the paint job on a bomb of car, the sort of thing teenagers do, .

 

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". Until measuring evolves to the standard that is necessary for these factors to be given numbers to, fairly easily, then no progress is going to be made in better understanding ...

 

The brain is very good at generating fakes, the part you're missing, Frank ;)

 

[botrytis]

7 hours ago, kumakuma said:

 

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

But, it could be in his head also. See, Frank thinks just because he hears it, it is real. It maybe his brain is actually doing it but until DBT is done, one will never know.

[pkane2001]

1 minute ago, botrytis said:

But, it could be in his head also. 

 

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 :)

[botrytis]

One has to realize our ears are as fallible as the rest of our senses.

[fas42]

 

[botrytis]

I do not use youtube for listening - you can keep you meh files.

 

Frank this is what you need. All your tweaks can be ignored. Serious.

 

I was impressed - this is the Tigerfox360 system.

 

[fas42]

Biggest set of headphones I've ever seen ... trouble is, I'm not a headphone guy ... .

[botrytis]

5 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Biggest set of headphones I've ever seen ... trouble is, I'm not a headphone guy ... .

 

Nearfield listening, silly. The whole system was less than 1000 USD they used. It was pretty amazing.

[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.

[The Computer Audiophile]

I watched a couple episodes of this show called Brain Games, with my daughter over the weekend. Made me realize this expectation bias thing goes both ways, and can even be more powerful than blind testing. Cool but crazy stuff. 

 

Here's one episode I found online. 

 

[botrytis]

@The Computer Audiophile People don't realize how much it affects them BOTH WAYS.

 

It is interesting and fascinating. Been reading papers on this topic since I really got more heavily into audio 25 years ago. I wanted to make sure I was hearing what I was hearing, not just some bee put in my bonnet by a salesman.

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 minutes ago, botrytis said:

@The Computer Audiophile People don't realize how much it affects them BOTH WAYS.

 

It is interesting and fascinating. Been reading papers on this topic since I really got more heavily into audio 25 years ago. I wanted to make sure I was hearing what I was hearing, not just some bee put in my bonnet by a salesman.

Absolutely. 

 

 

[danadam]

1 hour ago, kumakuma said:

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

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

Quote

Images of point sources spread out over a radius of more than one arcsecond, instead of having a point spread function (PSF) concentrated within a circle 0.1 arcseconds (485 nrad) in diameter, as had been specified in the design criteria.

 

[firedog]

11 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,

 

You recall wrong: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/an-ingenius-fix-for-hubbles-famously-flawed-vision/

 

They made a "contact lens" to fit over the lens to fix it.

[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. 👺

 

[botrytis]

44 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

 

 

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. 👺

 

 

We all make mistakes - it happens.

[fas42]

6 hours ago, firedog said:

 

You recall wrong: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/an-ingenius-fix-for-hubbles-famously-flawed-vision/

 

They made a "contact lens" to fit over the lens to fix it.

 

Tsk ... that it was a tongue in cheek comment was missed by some, .

[fas42]

10 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 :)

 

It's not "staggeringly small differences" that matter ... it's the absence of giveaways. The rule is, that if you don't notice any deficits in the SQ then it's, "good enough". So, what's a deficit? ... Anything, absolutely anything that reminds you that you're listening to a hifi rig - a sustained, effortless suspension of disbelief.

 

Added goodness is never the point ... it's the removal of all illusion breaking badness ...

[pkane2001]

5 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

It's not "staggeringly small differences" that matter ... it's the absence of giveaways. The rule is, that if you don't notice any deficits in the SQ then it's, "good enough". So, what's a deficit? ... Anything, absolutely anything that reminds you that you're listening to a hifi rig - a sustained, effortless suspension of disbelief.

 

Added goodness is never the point ... it's the removal of all illusion breaking badness ...

So you no longer advocate resoldering connectors? In my book, that’s an example of a staggeringly small to non-existent difference in 99.9999% of the cases. Just to give you an example with a precise probability estimate :)

[fas42]

28 minutes ago, pkane2001 said:

So you no longer advocate resoldering connectors? In my book, that’s an example of a staggeringly small to non-existent difference in 99.9999% of the cases. Just to give you an example with a precise probability estimate :)

 

If the connector can be shown to add contact noise, then solder it. If it doesn't appear to be a problem, then leave it alone, until more urgent things are sorted. That earliest system, decades ago, made it very obvious that the typical speaker connections, and RCA bits were death to SQ - so were eliminated. With the current system, the power on/off switch was identified as causing audible degradation; so bypassed. The umbilical between left and right speaker, plug in, so far hasn't shown itself to be significant; the connector design quality is adequate, and I've stabilised the plug/socket area.

 

You fix what you can show to yourself affects quality; and leave alone that which appears to be working correctly - this is a technique I call "common sense" - I think, I might copyright this, .