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Re: Hey, no denial here.

Posted by Steve Eddy on March 15, 2005 at 15:53:39

In Reply to: Hey, no denial here. posted by glennw on March 15, 2005 at 14:55:43:

I agree that perceived differences in sound are not *always* necessarily due to changes in equipment. There have been a few times when I have heard things that I wanted to hear, then later proved myself wrong. A humbling experience!

Yes, it is. But unfortunately for some egos win out over humility.

But that doesn't mean that perceived differences in sound are *never* due to changes in equipment, either.

Certainly. And I wasn't saying or implying otherwise.

Nor does it mean that those differences aren't *usually* due to changes in gear.

No. But by the same token, you're not going to know what's usual or unusual until you know what's actually going on.

So I don't think it's true to say that "there's not much point in measuring" just because we can't always be 100% sure that what we are trying to measure is actually an equipment change rather than a perceptual change. Seems to me the way to learn is to keep listening, keep measuring, and see what parallels can be drawn.

But parallels don't always tell you the truth either. In other words, correlation is not the same as causation. You can spend considerable amounts of time finding correlations just to end up right back where you started and you've only learned that you haven't learned much at all.

Seems to me the way to learn is to work on eliminating ambiguities.

The fact that you can read hundreds of postings on this board by tweakers who have made changes that they *didn't* like, strongly suggests that the natural human tendency to like something that we are predisposed to like, is not necessarily the dominating factor.

Well there's much more to our tendency to perceive differences even in the absence of actual differences than simple predisposition. Some of it hasn't anything at all to do with individual predisposition or expectation, such as the way our ear/brain system is hard wired to over detect. Or simply changing attention.

se

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