Tyll testing confirms: Burn-in is clearly audible - Page 2  

This is because of the very large possibility that their perception is compromised by various forms of bias and placebo. All of these psychological phenomena are well documented. Generally speaking, based on scientific research in this field, it is more highly probable that some form of bias is responsible for the difference being heard, rather than an actual, real objective change that can be measured with apparatus far more sensitive than human hearing. Its just a fact of life - our perception can be fooled extremely easily, particularly when we [i]want[/i] to hear an improvement. This is not to say that many audiophile myths arent grounded in reality. It just means that we need to be very careful and approach every audiophile belief with an appropriate amount of scepticism and scientific scrutiny.
 

 

Well I'm not affected by placebo or bias.  I have 24 years of mixing experience under my belt and it was forged in an environment where truth lives and falsehood is out the door by lunch time. theres none of that did we hear the same things?  Is what we just heard real?    I'm wondering if the well documented phenomenon actually was tested on people who use their aural skills professionally 8--10-12 hours a day in conjunction with other professionals doing the same routine or wether the test simply took someone with non professional, average developed aural perception and aural memory and decided the results were de facto and completely valid and always true.

 

Anyway plenty of parameters in audio perception cannot be measured with these pedantic measurements.  Can you measure soundstage?  Yet it does exist. Can you measure the silkiness of a violin string? You know it when you hear it.   People who go on and on about placebo and and bias towards what they might hear or wether or not their minds are playing tricks on them rather than confirm that what they do hear is real need to gain a little confidence in what they hear instead of always looking for some ridiculous scientific proof.  Just trust your ears.  What's going into them is real.  It really is as easy as that.

 

Is this serious?  How do you explain all the results like these, other than "well, my ears/brain is better than those of other audio professionals"?

http://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/04/dishonesty-of-sighted-audio-product.html

 

 

Anyway, it depends on the headphones (or speakers), but previous results sometimes show frequency response changes after burn in that may be audible (and FR is never the whole story).  There's little evidence that suddenly headphones break some magical hour mark of burn in and then significantly change right then, though.

Quote:

 

I'm afraid your statement here is full of logical fallacies. Claiming that you are not affected by placebo or bias because you are an audio professional is an example of a fallacious argument from authority. You also claim that the people you've worked with share your view. This is an example of argumentum ad populum and doesn't prove anything, perhaps besides that audio professionals, just like all other humans, are susceptible to the bandwagon effect.

 

Oh god!  the same old thing about "Fallacious argument from authority" because one has experience  and of course the "argumentum ad populum" because people with experience come to find the same truths together.  How weary.

 

I'll leave you to wrestle with everything else other than the actual truth your ears present you.  Take care.

 

 

Seriously?

Sometimes I will only want to reply with 'Oh, right..' and this is the time, Maybe his hearing is really beyond machines measurements.

 

Yeah seriously.  I couldn't have made a living if I was letting myself be fooled all the time.  Maybe I was decades ago but that was probably just a case of not being experienced  and confident to know and understand what I was really hearing.   I'm not coming from a point of view of arrogance. Just years of endless experience and confidence and ability derived form that experience.  It's nothing special, just something you obtain from experiencing audio on a professional basis day after day for a few decades.  Just trust your ears. they are not lying to you.

Edited by WarriorAnt - 9/8/11 at 9:32pm

 

 

Even taking his own personal evaluation away I find his advice to be poor. He doesn't discount that placebo exists, but that he's not susceptible to it because of his experience. That's fine, but how can you tell others who probably don't have experience that they also aren't susceptible to placebo. There is always a subjective part to sound, such as a preferred sound signature or a hearing deficiency, but there is a measurable aspect to it as well and to completely disregard that in a discussion with others is silly. 
 

 

Sound is the human perception of air pressure waves.  "Perception" is the important part.  The air pressure waves can be measured by machines easily, but if somebody perceives two sources which measure the same as being two different sounds, who's to say that his hearing is wrong?  This is not a metaphor, people literally don't hear the same thing that other people do.  But burn-in has never been proven to have a significant effect on audio equipment.

 

And don't trust your ears.  Aural illusions exist just as much as optical illusions do.  Being in a field and making a living in it for a long time don't make you infallible nor the ultimate authority on a subject.  How many times have you seen "experts" proven wrong?...

I wanted to read thru this thread before I took my leave of it and I find one thing truly amazing.  All I've seen here is a multitude of posts in which there is nothing but mistrust and almost a disdain for the ability of ones own ear to discern any actual reality.  No one here seems to trust their own ability to hear any truth it's all don't trust your hearing. The ear is intrinsically faulty. Don't forget the "placebo" effect! We need scientific proof of the ears ability to hear! Give us charts and graphs!  Aural perception is a slippery slope don't trust it the ear will fool you every step of the way!  Trick you and lead you astray!  The ear can't really be hearing those ephemeral changes!  Only concrete instrument measurable results can really tell us if what we hear is real or not!  For a group of people drawn to a forum specifically for the art and pleasure of hearing it's mind boggling how very little if any confidence you have in your ability to actually hear any truth.  Every comment seems to lead away from the confidence of the ears prowess.  

 

It's mind boggling, and sad, and mind boggling.

WarriorAnt, look at a few optical illusions and then tell us that your brain is the ultimate arbiter of truth. It sure as hell isn't. Your hearing gets processed along with bias, expectation and placebo. Humans totally suck at this kind of thing. A 25¢ ruler can kick your butt when it comes to measuring distance. Anyone want to argue that?

Any halfway decent psychologist could thoroughly humiliate you. So could a trained magician. You are willing to cast doubt on science, but falsely think you can't cast doubt on the ridiculously inaccurate human. Your perceptions are wrong. There are lots of ways to demonstrate this - a few Google searches will turn up hundreds of ways humans fool themselves. If you think you're an exception, prove it.

This test is fatally flawed due to a bad assumption. It assumes that all production pairs of headphones are exactly identical.

Not so. There are always production variations among the same model.

You have to prove that two pairs are identical to begin with, then prove that one pair changed substantially after purported break-in.

Assuming two items to be identical at first without demonstrating them to be so is not a legitimate test. If I told you that a penny and a nickel were identical, but the nickel was worth more after 1,000 hours, you'd rightly call it a fraud.
Edited by Uncle Erik - 9/9/11 at 3:32am

 

 

Off-topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTlN6wjcvQ

 

Will read and comment on Tyll's findings later. 

 

Edit: Interesting experiment. Unfortunately as many have highlighted, two different headphones are not identical. The difference in sound could've been manufacturing differences so the a better way to conduct a burn-in experiment is to pick two identical headphones, burn one pair in and then blind test them both.

Edited by koolkat - 9/9/11 at 5:47am