ast retorted: Quote:
When designing Clinical trials for new medicine, you MUST eliminate placebo effect, which is " try yourself and judge " type of effect you mentioned here. You think you HEAR some difference does NOT mean there IS any difference. |
You're talking to someone who develops medical devices for a living.
Your analogy is flawed in that one does not directly observe the relationship between a drug taken and any changes in symptoms being studied. But hearing reproduced music with your innate ability to distinguish real sounds is a direct observation, not a correlation. It does not require aggregation of statistics or placebo control, not when you are judging for your own purchase.
What I find it does require is to have a high threshold for when you think something sounds different. I deliberately assume the null hypothesis that something doesn't make a difference. Then, only if an observed change in character is consistent, repeatable at different volume levels, with different music, on different days, with trials done in different orders, will I gain confidence that perhaps the null hypothesis is false.
While this is not strictly "objective" (no music listening is or can be objective), it is "observational" and not merely "subjective."
It also benefits from using live unamplified music as a reference, or at least a reference system of such quality that you can tell when the sound is truer to timbre and texture and image, not just "more treble" or "less harsh."
While this won't prove anything to anyone else with a closed mind, I find it is entirely sufficient for my primary purpose: to decide what I want to own and listen to. So, yes, what matters is listening for yourself and making a value judgment.
Also, I have found that when I share reviews of what I observed over time, using varied and descriptive language, metaphors, and multiple examples, it enables others to confirm my observations, if their experimental setup allows for it to be detected, and if they are one of the 75-80% or so of us with normal hearing. A "good" review (in my definition) is one that is sufficient to allow others to assess whether they would enjoy it in their own systems, or even notice it. I don't write a review for others to be convinced to agree with me (good/bad)... I write it to point out what they might hear if they had the chance, and in what ways it might make a musically relevant difference in their systems. Like a Hitchcock enthusiast who reviews Vertigo well enough that you could tell it isn't your cup of tea.
This one learns over years, even decades. I've confirmed over 30 years that I'm not susceptible to placebo with sonic differences; but rather, I tend to overlook minor differences. On the other hand, if I see ants crawling on the table, suddenly I find myself getting itchy. THAT I'm suggestible about!