you cannot trust your eyes, so why trust your ears?

Hey linuxworks. I also think the same way, but be prepared for a flame war, insults by other members feeling "offended" and such...

Another thing to point out is that hearing and sight are related, as when using site placebo comes into play.

And I may add that not only "often can be fooled", but also can be fooled easily.

well I'm colorblind, and I don't think this thing work on me...at all. but I always fail the color blindness tests BIG TIME

well it's the same story as the chess board I think? I don't see anything blue, so I can't really tell..

Chess Board Tiles Optical Illusion

you can't trust your eyes, nor your ears...they do heavy DSP on ya. I think you can trust your ears for 30 secs in the morning, that is all.

I thought our ears' (and brains) being "fooled" was the whole point. Stereo imaging fools our brain into thinking that a certain sound is here and another there. As to the larger epistemological point, Descartes had this figured out a long time ago.

Agree. If there is no 'fooling' around, I am not sure music reproduction will be that much enjoyable.

I'm fine with the idea that our senses can fool us, but "objectivists" like to present optical illusions as if they were proof every single context is suspect.

The specific illusion of concern with sighted test is something entirely different than an optical illusion---it's bias.

I think food scientists have demonstrated that people will "prefer" the food in the expensive packaging over the cheap packaging even it's the same food. That's what were dealing with, only it's the "packaging" of the cable, or amplifier, or CD player.

But just as illusions break sighted tests, what doesn't seem to be acknowledged very often is that illusions can break blind tests too. There's no reason illusions go away just because the test is blind.

For example, I think that quick-switching creates an illusion in which musical features of sound vanish from your consciousness. Or a very simple kind of illusion happens when you listen to music repeatedly: assuming this is rich music, you'll notice different things each time, giving rise to the illusion that the music has changed. (If you are NOT using rich music for your blind tests, then you are creating the illusion that two devices are the same by way of having removed the factors in which they differ.)

Good question!
I am quite sure our mind may play tricks with us when it comes to hearing as well. Guess that is why lossy audio codecs work so surprisingly well...

These visual tricks are great fun, but I’m struggling to find the listening analogy with this particular one. So here is a story show one interpretation. For ease of analogy, just pretend that we can HEAR colours and that the real colour is Turquoise. The story:

Believer (B) and Non-Believer (NB) are reviewing a headphone. This headphone has an obvious frequency response peak and so both listeners agree that they hear Blue when they expected to hear Turquoise. NB further proves this fact by using a professional spectrum analyser thingy to show that the sound has indeed changed to Blue. So far so good, but then then Believer starts talking:

B: “When I swapped in this new cable, I also heard Blue, even after we found a totally neutral headphone. And when I swapped in a different cable, I then heard Green.

NB: “The sound is definitely Turquoise at both input and output of the cable. Look, my professional spectrum analyser thingy proves it. You are a gullible fool with more money than sense”.

B: “Don’t tell me what I can hear, you half-witted baboon”.

NB: “Typical of you to resort to personal insults when losing a debate”.

B: “Well you started on the personal insults by calling me a gullible fool”.

NB: “That wasn’t an insult, it was the logical scientific explanation of your delusions”.

B: “You *%$& - @~#!!@”

…and so goes on the noble art of intellectual debate.

Anyway the moral of this story is that they are both right, but one is “more right” than the other. It is immaterial that the professional spectrum analyser thingy has conclusively proven that the colour is Turquoise. The listener is genuinely hearing Blue and that’s what really counts. There’s nothing wrong with the professional spectrum analyser thingy – it’s just not measuring the parameter that matters, which in this case is the affect on the listener when one colour interacts with another.

Thanks for that. It was interesting and funny.

Also you have hit the nail on the head---what is the analogy?

Here's my comment--

In the optical illusion, at least our eyes are functioning perfectly reliably and predictably. There is a reason we see what we see.

The question really is: if you change the appearance of that spiral, would we be able to detect a change?

And the question is: does our perception become unreliably and random when the differences are small? for example, in ABX testing, if there was some reason we perceived "bright" sound as "dark sound" ---some illusion---that wouldn't necessarily mean we can't tell A and B apart. If this illusion was reliable and repeatable, then we would have no problem!

So I don't think this is analogous at all.

That depends on the illusion.

Why do you need to know what cable you're listening to during a test? What does that add? If you can agree that the label on the side has nothing to do with the sound, then you should be able to hear the difference without seeing the logo.

You can dance around that fact all you want, but the bottom line is that no one hears a difference unless they know what it is they're listening to.

You can torture semantics and find multiple conspiracies in every last form of testing, but the only difference is in your head and only when you know what it is you're listening to. There are no other differences. You would find a coathanger inside a Cardas sleeve to sound indistinguishable from the genuine article as long as you didn't know there was a coathanger inside.

Where did you get the idea this thread is about cables as opposed to amplifiers or headphones?

Yes, there are auditory illusions as well.
link 1
link 2

But your mind may also be fooled, Descartes not withstanding. Any Cognition textbook is full of examples of common errors in human thought analogous to perceptual illusions. So should we abandon both rationalism and empiricism?

The thread is about illusions and the relative reliability of our senses. He used cables to illustrate how this applies to audio. He could have easily used amplifiers to make the same point.

Now with that out of the way, what'd you think of the points he was making? Is there any real reason to need to see the audio equipment you are trying to assess?