[Mr Rick]

  I do 2 hours of breathing exercises before testing gear to protect myself from bias. it doesn't work.

 
I have a self-bias circuit. Works a treat.

 

[ToddRaymond]

We just watched the X-Files episode last night, entitled "Pusher" (written by Vince Gilligan), which involves a sociopathic individual who possess a rather heightened ability to impose his will on others, manipulating his subjects to carry out horrible and often self destructive acts.  Seems relevant.
 
Although, with regard to the subject at hand, as much as we seem to enjoy pointing the finger at others when we feel they're being misled, we often feel to see our own folly in that regard.  That ol' mirror is tricky like that.

 

[MWSVette]

   
I have to watch that myself, but it's usually the social pressure "Doesn't this sound better to you?" that gets me.
 
When I bought my Gumby, and substituted it in for my Modi, the first couple albums I tried (Telarc Bach collections) didn't sound improved at all, and I wondered if I wasted my money.  It was from an unexpected place -- Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms -- that I had my "WOW!" moment.
 
I have to work hard, though, to keep my biases out.

Dire Straits Brother in Arms is one of my all time favorite tracks to test new equipment.  Very well produced album...
 

 

[TonyNewman]

  re: audio trickery and things that happen at shows.  A friend of mine was the Halcro distributor for the West Coast and about ten years ago was demoing his high-end gear at RMAF in Denver.  I was shooting the breeze with him (and negotiating the purchase of some show demo gear) and he said he was going to do something fun.  So I sat back and watched.  There were five or six people listening to the demo when he stepped in front of the setup and introduced himself.  He produced a small screwdriver (a tweaker for those who know the term) and announced that Halcro has a new setting on the back called "Sparkle."  He invited everyone to listen carefully as he changed the setting.  He turned the volume down, went behind the preamp and pretended to make an adjustment on the imaginary setting, came back in front and with a smile and a flourish turned the volume back up.  I think it was playing "Rites of Spring."  The audiophooles in the audience oohhed and ahhed and said yes, they could really hear the difference, and started asking questions about exactly what was "sparkle" and why only Halcro talked about it.  I had to leave because I was laughing too much.
 
I did end up buying the gear by the way.  No sparkle adjustments I'm afraid.

 
This is exactly why blind testing is the gold standard for gear comparison. If you can't pick a difference consistently in a blind test, then you are fooling yourself.
 

  ...I have to work hard, though, to keep my biases out.

 
You can't. You can try all you like, but the human brain is hard wired to operate from all sorts expectation bias. Only a blind test isolates you from the bias and produces 'real' results.
 
Which is why this cable silliness has NEVER passed a credible blind test.

 

[Ableza]

Embrace your biases.  If you like something then you like it and the "why" doesn't matter. 

 

[Armaegis]

   
I have a self-bias circuit. Works a treat.

 
Some call it meditation. Others call it whiskey...

 

[sam6550a]

   
I have a self-bias circuit. Works a treat.

Is it microprocessor controlled?

 

[sam6550a]

  re: audio trickery and things that happen at shows.  A friend of mine was the Halcro distributor for the West Coast and about ten years ago was demoing his high-end gear at RMAF in Denver.  I was shooting the breeze with him (and negotiating the purchase of some show demo gear) and he said he was going to do something fun.  So I sat back and watched.  There were five or six people listening to the demo when he stepped in front of the setup and introduced himself.  He produced a small screwdriver (a tweaker for those who know the term) and announced that Halcro has a new setting on the back called "Sparkle."  He invited everyone to listen carefully as he changed the setting.  He turned the volume down, went behind the preamp and pretended to make an adjustment on the imaginary setting, came back in front and with a smile and a flourish turned the volume back up.  I think it was playing "Rites of Spring."  The audiophooles in the audience oohhed and ahhed and said yes, they could really hear the difference, and started asking questions about exactly what was "sparkle" and why only Halcro talked about it.  I had to leave because I was laughing too much.
 
I did end up buying the gear by the way.  No sparkle adjustments I'm afraid.

P. T. Barnum is alive and well selling "high end" audio equipment.

 

[sam6550a]

  Embrace your biases.  If you like something then you like it and the "why" doesn't matter. 

So very true. My wife of 46 years listens to music and video on her cell phone, which drives me insane because of the poor, compressed audio and high distortion speakers. She, however, cannot listen to uncompressed 24/96000 and find any difference from the compressed MP3/tiny speaker cell phone. This is true for speakers or cans. I just accept it-as I have for the last decades. Individual perception is as individual as DNA, perhaps more so.
 
If you like it, it is fine for you. I will not argue or influence.

 

[DigitalFrontEnd]

 
P. T. Barnum is alive and well selling "high end" audio equipment.

This was my first stereo salesman:
 

 

[Argo Duck]

It's not even expectation bias necessarily.

Cognitive attention is a limited resource (so my cognitive science colleagues tell me), and music is complex and information-rich. When we listen to the same piece of music - especially within a short period of time - novelty-seeking features of our brain along with other factors such as changed mood, tiredness etc can bring different aspects of the sound into the foreground of our limited attentional 'window'. In other words, we attend to different parts of the music and hence hear different things.

The new information isn't "wrong" - it's information we didn't notice on the previous round.

If something about the listening context changes - e.g. gear changes; a claim someone makes - it's easy and natural to attribute the changed sound to the gear or claim. It's a mistake of attribution, not necessarily evidence that one 'heard what one expected or was told to expect'.

This is something so-called "within-subjects" research designs have to control for: these are designs where the same subjects experience all the experimental conditions, and responses are measured to determine the presumed effect of each condition.

 

[AudioBear]

Argo Duck makes an important point.  We think we are in control when in fact there's a lot going on in our heads that isn't as constant and reproducible as we all assume it is.
 
We also apparently can't -- or don't need to -- process audio continuously.  Our brain does something analogous to sampling and digitization, which is to sample short fragments of the incoming sound which are sufficient for the brain to interpret (reconstruct) the incoming audio. Which parts we sample varies from play to play, this may be part of why we hear new features in the music all the time.  How much resolution is given to the incoming audio depends on our mood, degree of attention, and continuous evaluation of the situation around us.  A loud noise behind us will turn on full audio processing very quickly.  For those of us trying to memorize a musical piece it also helps explain why we have to listen many times to finally get it right. Ear training helps make us better at this but we all have varying degrees of acuity and skill at audio processing.

 

[FrivolsListener]

  You can't. You can try all you like, but the human brain is hard wired to operate from all sorts expectation bias. Only a blind test isolates you from the bias and produces 'real' results.

Well, I make the effort.   For me, it makes me enjoy the music more as I learn the piece, I learn more and more about it.   It's not so much audio nervosa.
 
 
At least, I  hope not.

 

[Pyrolistical]

TL;DR the adc in our head is unreliable

 

[fargus]

Originally posted by Ableza
 
re: audio trickery and things that happen at shows.  A friend of mine was the Halcro distributor for the West Coast and about ten years ago was demoing his high-end gear at RMAF in Denver.  I was shooting the breeze with him (and negotiating the purchase of some show demo gear) and he said he was going to do something fun.  So I sat back and watched.  There were five or six people listening to the demo when he stepped in front of the setup and introduced himself.  He produced a small screwdriver (a tweaker for those who know the term) and announced that Halcro has a new setting on the back called "Sparkle."  He invited everyone to listen carefully as he changed the setting.  He turned the volume down, went behind the preamp and pretended to make an adjustment on the imaginary setting, came back in front and with a smile and a flourish turned the volume back up.  I think it was playing "Rites of Spring."  The audiophooles in the audience oohhed and ahhed and said yes, they could really hear the difference, and started asking questions about exactly what was "sparkle" and why only Halcro talked about it.  I had to leave because I was laughing too much.
 
I did end up buying the gear by the way.  No sparkle adjustments I'm afraid.

Rites of Spring, the DC hardcore band? Or is this a different Rites of Spring? I'm surprised a vendor would use lo-fi 80s punk as a demo to sell speakers to audiophiles.