[b0dhi]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shark_Jump /img/forum/go_quote.gif Sorry I'm an old fart over 35 years old. Could you please explain the meaning of 'AFAIK' and 'FOTM' and please bear in mind anachronisms like myself if you use abbreviations again.

Ah yes, I remember being annoyed at reading "AFAIK" not long ago and wondering what the hell it meant, and why the guy writing it decided to compress what must be a paragraph into an acronym. Anyway, AFAIK = as far as I know, and FOTM is flavour of the month. FOTM is the phenomenon whereby some new audio miracle gets all the attention for a while, and everyone buys it and proclaims it as being the Best Thing Ever. Soon it's forgotten and replaced by the next FOTM, and the cycle repeats ad infinitum.

 

[THAY BRAN]

I recently switched my $500 interconnects for a set of sterevox SE and realised what i had been missing, my chin almost hit the floor. Damn that placebo effect

 

[THAY BRAN]

I think i will sell my Bryston bcd1 and get an entry level Nad and hope the placebo kicks in big time.

 

[TwoTrack]

Quote:

Originally Posted by THAY BRAN /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think i will sell my Bryston bcd1 and get an entry level Nad and hope the placebo kicks in big time.

 

[Shark_Jump]

Quote:

Originally Posted by THAY BRAN /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think i will sell my Bryston bcd1 and get an entry level Nad and hope the placebo kicks in big time.

I'm sure if you beieve in cables etc. you will 'hear' the reduced sound quality with cheap cables as much as the 'improved' sound quality with expensive cables. You can't have one without the other.

In your opinion do you believe in the Placebo effect and think it effects you at all?

 

[aimlink]

This is a pesky thing... placebo. Here's my experience.

I initially had a foobar III amp/dac and upgraded to a MicroAmp. I used the FoobarIII's output for the MicroAmp. The MicroAmp was about 50% more expensive than the Foobar and a dedicated amp. You can imagine how I felt when I heard no significant improvement. I didn't feel good at all. It was when I replaced the Foobar with a SpitFire DAC that I heard a difference. I also heard a difference when I switched to HeadRoom's Ultra Micro Stack, but it was again, surprisingly subtle. So subtle, in fact, that I've never mustered the urge to significantly upgrade. I've been really wary of pumping money into another setup only to not hear significant differences.

Another disappointment was the Cardas cable. Again, nothing significant that I was certain of. I continued with it anyway since I had the cable.

Not so with the ALO cable for the K702's. This difference, I could heard. I was really startled by it when after listening for a long time to the ALO cable and switched back to the stock. Uncle Erik is now trying to tell me I imagined it with the power of suggestion.

Placebo is a hell of thing if this is the case. Unpredictable and not just based on what's consciously felt or thought. It doesn't seem to be selective either since in some important and expensive cases, I haven't heard a difference.

 

[jax]

I think someone in these forums may have referred me to Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke. Check out This Video of one of his lectures on Why Placebos Work. I checked out a few additional videos - you'll find several links to the right - fascinating stuff presented with humor and on a level that anyone can relate to. If you are interested in Placebo effect check it out. Here's his lecture at the TED conference.

 

[Happy Camper]

Ever!

 

[eucariote]

With all respect to the op, I don't think that these articles address the effect of expectation, hope, vision, etc. on auditory experience. They address somatic health effects of expectation over a period of days and weeks, which is not the same thing. The effect of top-down mechanisms on activity in primary sensory cortex has been demonstrated many times. In English, this means that activity in the cortex most directly connected to sensory organs (retina, cochlea) is strongly affected by other (sense, memory, attention) systems in the brain and not just external inputs.

e.g. the last 3 sentences of this abstract
Anatomy of the auditory cortex

or the last sentence of this abstract
Corticofugal modulation of the information processing in the auditory thalamus

and there are many, many other studies.

(this is not to say that cables do or do not affect produced sound, i don't know)

 

[Shark_Jump]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jax /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think someone in these forums may have referred me to Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke. Check out This Video of one of his lectures on Why Placebos Work. I checked out a few additional videos - you'll find several links to the right - fascinating stuff presented with humor and on a level that anyone can relate to. If you are interested in Placebo effect check it out. Here's his lecture at the TED conference.

Thanks thats an excellent link thanks.

Quote from Futurama.....

Amy: You should try homeopathic medicine, Bender. Take some zinc.
Bender: I'm 40% zinc!
Amy: Then take some Echinacea, or St. John's wort.
Professor Farnsworth: Or a big, fat placebo! It's all the same crap!

 

[aristos_achaion]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mesasone /img/forum/go_quote.gif So what you're saying is that if you believe putting a couple of extra 99 into the purity percentage of a copper wire, your ears will reconfigure or recalibrate themselves so that the sound really does sound better? Or are you suggesting that believing your fancy pants cable results in increased dopamine levels, which has little to do with the actual, measurable performance of the cable and everything to do with the belief? And as long as you believe that the cable is somehow special, it doesn't matter if it comes from a boutique manufacturer or Radioshack?

It means that you don't just think you're hearing something nicer/warmer/brighter, you actually are hearing the effect because you're thinking it. I suppose that means if you put a fancy label on a cable and passed it off as, say, a Zu Mobius, people would really hear their Senns as less veiled, rather than hearing the same thing and claiming they heard a difference to justify the cost.

So it's not so much the data the ears pull in, it's the brain's pre-conscious processing of the data.

 

[SP Wild]

Ummmm...... Placebo is just confidence.

Is that not obvious?

 

[aimlink]

Quote:

Originally Posted by aristos_achaion /img/forum/go_quote.gif It means that you don't just think you're hearing something nicer/warmer/brighter, you actually are hearing the effect because you're thinking it. I suppose that means if you put a fancy label on a cable and passed it off as, say, a Zu Mobius, people would really hear their Senns as less veiled, rather than hearing the same thing and claiming they heard a difference to justify the cost. So it's not so much the data the ears pull in, it's the brain's pre-conscious processing of the data.

Wouldn't it more telling if we stop using cables as an example? It would be more exciting if we chose different headphones or amps.

How much placebo do you think is working when listener 'A' claims that one headphones sounds like night and day when compared to another?

 

[JadeEast]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jax /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think someone in these forums may have referred me to Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke. Check out This Video of one of his lectures on Why Placebos Work. I checked out a few additional videos - you'll find several links to the right - fascinating stuff presented with humor and on a level that anyone can relate to. If you are interested in Placebo effect check it out. Here's his lecture at the TED conference.

Probably me as I've pimped him a few times. Here is a new video from the man. Still not related to hearing but interesting in regards to Placebo.

YouTube - Placebo

 

[eucariote]

I came across an article today that sheds light the effect on placebos on sensory experience. As someone speculated earlier, it turns out that expectation really can enhance the effect of dopamine in brain reward systems. These circuits, in addition to having analgesic effects (the focus of the article) have been shown to make animals and humans prefer and desire previously neutral conditioned stimuli.

Again, these findings do not to show that cables, etc. do or do not affect sound production, only that expectations can directly alter our sensory experience.