Let's share placebo effect anecdotes!

[kemmler3D]

One of the challenges the "objectivist community" has is some refuse to believe that they could be affected by cognitive biases in hearing*. Some people are, but not them!. The idea is that somehow knowledge of the effects, or lots of listening experience immunizes them. If only it were so.

Hopefully we here are humble enough to realize that the brain never fully steps out of the way. Let's collect some anecdotes about cognitive bias affecting what people hear... it might get some gears turning... plus I find them amusing.

Anyway, here's mine:

At my previous job we sold Bluetooth headphones. We occasionally did firmware updates to improve different things about how the headphone worked, stuff like how the lights blinked or how long you had to press buttons to do certain things.

Once, after an update, I sent a customer satisfaction survey to our users, and got at least couple dozen responses. In the survey, (feeling cheeky) I asked whether the sound quality had improved, stayed the same, or got worse. The vast majority of users reported the sound quality improved, some saying it improved a lot.

In fact, the sound quality had not changed even a tiny bit. There was a global EQ on the BT module, but we hadn't touched the settings.

Not only did SOME people hear a change, almost all of them did, or thought they did. I had used a Likert scale (rate this from 1-7, 1= much worse, 7=much better) for this question. If cognitive bias / placebo affected hearing not at all, or in a neutral way, the responses would have been clustered around the middle value (no change), perhaps in a normal distribution. What actually happened is that the answers were heavily skewed towards the maximum rating.

Decoding the lesson here for how audio marketing works is an exercise left to the reader.

I've also personally spent more time than I care to admit being disappointed in how small a change a given filter or EQ knob was making, before realizing it wasn't active at all. The act of turning the knob makes the brain hear something... because you expect to hear something.

*I think it's humbling to realize your ears are fallible, but are you really ashamed of simply being human? We're all in the same boat whether we admit it or not.

 

[thegeton]

While listening to my system, I thought that it sounded different than normal. I checked the miniDSP SHD settings and “discovered” that I had somehow imported the “incorrect filter file.” So, I imported the proper file, loaded it into the SHD, waited for the unit to come back online and voila! Amazing sound was once again being produced. Veils lifted, my sonic mastery assured.

Later I reviewed both files just to see what was different. Imagine my surprise when I discovered they were identical internally. Somehow, I had saved identical settings under two completely different file names.

 

[Talisman]

The first gift ever that I gave to my current wife was a Bluetooth speaker, she listened to music from a music channel on an old TV and as a good lover of sound I found this thing unbearable. I remember choosing the speaker based partly on reviews and partly on aesthetics, the price is around 40 euros and I expected it to sound decently good. When we listened to it for the first time I remember being extremely disappointed, a dead sound, disembodied, unbalanced and not at all satisfying.
Well
About a year later I bought another Bluetooth speaker because it cost very little and I was curious, unknown brand, paid 17 euros. As soon as I opened it and listened to it I was struck by how good it sounded, such a pleasant sound, not at all fatiguing, all frequencies well represented, incredible, a real treat for the ears for the cost of a McDonald's lunch.
Surprised by this difference, I wanted to make my wife feel like her price said nothing about her quality, making her feel the difference between the first case I had given her and this super cheap one that had delighted me instead.
To my horror, when they played in rapid succession they showed nothing of what I thought, I had to realize that they actually sounded incredibly similar in every way.
My expectation of how they should sound did all the work.

 

[Mnyb]

One of the challenges the "objectivist community" has is some refuse to believe that they could be affected by cognitive biases in hearing*. Some people are, but not them!. The idea is that somehow knowledge of the effects, or lots of listening experience immunizes them. If only it were so.

Hopefully we here are humble enough to realize that the brain never fully steps out of the way. Let's collect some anecdotes about cognitive bias affecting what people hear... it might get some gears turning... plus I find them amusing.

Anyway, here's mine:

At my previous job we sold Bluetooth headphones. We occasionally did firmware updates to improve different things about how the headphone worked, stuff like how the lights blinked or how long you had to press buttons to do certain things.

Once, after an update, I sent a customer satisfaction survey to our users, and got at least couple dozen responses. In the survey, (feeling cheeky) I asked whether the sound quality had improved, stayed the same, or got worse. The vast majority of users reported the sound quality improved, some saying it improved a lot.

In fact, the sound quality had not changed even a tiny bit. There was a global EQ on the BT module, but we hadn't touched the settings.

Not only did SOME people hear a change, almost all of them did, or thought they did. I had used a Likert scale (rate this from 1-7, 1= much worse, 7=much better) for this question. If cognitive bias / placebo affected hearing not at all, or in a neutral way, the responses would have been clustered around the middle value (no change), perhaps in a normal distribution. What actually happened is that the answers were heavily skewed towards the maximum rating.

Decoding the lesson here for how audio marketing works is an exercise left to the reader.

I've also personally spent more time than I care to admit being disappointed in how small a change a given filter or EQ knob was making, before realizing it wasn't active at all. The act of turning the knob makes the brain hear something... because you expect to hear something.

*I think it's humbling to realize your ears are fallible, but are you really ashamed of simply being human? We're all in the same boat whether we admit it or not.

Similar stories where around on the squeezebox forum , there where always someone that thought the latest fw sounded different.

 

[Purité Audio]

Personally I am completely immune to placebo.
Keith

 

[Verig]

Not a product placebo story but I'm always surprised how different my set sounds when I have time to really relax and dim the lights. Especially late when it's quiet. Perhaps some vine but not even needed.
Everything's good, soundstage is stable, not a hint of tweeter distortion, punchy but smooth delivery, tuned a bit "warm" on purpose, it's just as it should be. I have a pretty nice mid-fi set, measured and Dirac corrected (and adjusted to taste) so objectively I know it always sounds pretty good. But some days it does not sound good and I feel I should tweak something. With time I've learned when I really shouldn't.

 

[DVDdoug]

Maybe, but I think I've always been somewhat skeptical of my hearing... Decades ago, I thought those golden-ear audiophiles were hearing real differences that I couldn't hear.*

I may have had placebo experiences back in the vinyl analog days. I was always dissatisfied with the sound of records and I was always upgrading (or wanting to upgrade) my cartridge. The new one always sounded better, or at least different and I would tell myself it was better. But I didn't have an easy way to A/B so I was never sure. I KNEW the biggest problem was the records because some sounded "good", but I wanted the best that I could afford and I foolishly upgraded more than I needed to.

I did have an interesting adaptation experience once... Almost the opposite of placebo... I worked at a place that repaired car stereos and I was trying to fix a unit with distortion. After working on it awhile I wasn't sure if I was still hearing the distortion or if I'd fixed it (we didn't have a distortion analyzer). I had to listen to something that wasn't broken to reset my ears/brain and then the distortion was obvious again.




* There are trained listeners who can hear defects that I can't. But the stuff I was reading used all of that nonsense audiophile terminology so now I assume it was mostly their imagination. And I have avoided training myself because I DON'T WANT to hear defects that I'm not noticing now!

 

[GoDawgs]

I know a guy (like the back of my hand), who was moving a subwoofer around different spots and listening for bass improvement with the power off. He never thought it sounded better, but he didn't notice.....he said.

 

[Verig]

.
* There are trained listeners who can hear defects that I can't. But the stuff I was reading used all of that nonsense audiophile terminology so now I assume it was mostly their imagination. And I have avoided training myself because I DON'T WANT to hear defects that I'm not noticing now!

I know a few musician golden ears who are into hifi. Their choice of words are sometimes... interesting the very least. But I mostly know what they mean so it's more than imagination. It gets pretty funny sometimes as I know how distortions and effects "really sound" whereas they know classical instruments. We listen to different things and are bothered by very different aspects of a speaker sound.
It's great when you talk to people and actually listen in the same space. Where it gets tricky is reading reviews. But it's the same with music reviews, you need to know the reviewer's taste and especially where that taste differs from your own even if it's usually close enough.

Having said that, yes, hifi reviews are often full of... imagination.

 

[MattHooper]

I'm sure there are plenty I'm not remembering, or even don't know about yet. But the experiences that come immediately to mind are the bias effects that were exposed through my blind testing.

In the late 90s I could have sworn that a really expensive, thick, well-reviewed AC cable changed the sound of my system to more lush, darker toned. Then I had an engineer pal help me blind test between that AC cable and a standard cheap AC cable, and those sonic differences disappeared.

Similarly, back in the analog video cable days, video cables were susceptible to all the subjectivist golden eye imaginings, with "reviews" of different high end video cables talking about added clarity, color richness, contrast etc increased with expensive video cables. I got hold of some Nordost component cables and compared them to my standard cables and...hmmm...maybe it looks a bit sharper and richer? So I got hold of a variety of component video cables, from cheap to pro grade and up to the Nordost, and did some blind testing. Then the differences disappeared. I then put together a sort of blind test for the members of the AVSforum, where I took very carefully controlled photos of the image using each cable, hid the identities of the cables, and put them up for evaluation. When the identifies where revealed it's clear the comments were random with respect to video quality. I remember discovering a bias effect even with the photos. As I remember it: if I put two photos side by side, the one on the left looked sharper and better. But as soon as I reversed their position, putting the "worse quality" photo on the left, then it looked slightly better! (It was either that or some precedence effect, where the first image I looked at looked better than the second. I can't remember precisely).

Then there was the time I switched from my Apple based music server to a Raspberry Pi /logitech server, and for some reason I perceived the new server as slightly brighter and more brittle sounding. It bothered me because on technical grounds I wasn't expecting it. So an audio pal helped me do a randomized blind test (easy because my source components are in a different room from my listening area) and once again sonic differences vanished. And once I realized they actually sounded the same I never really perceived that "brightness" again and the system sounded as it always did.

 

[majingotan]

People often say tube amps sound best after playing back a while, but never I have ever experienced that. Playing music after 10 seconds of powering my tube amp sounds exactly the same as when it's been on and playing music past 1 hour or beyond already

 

[MattHooper]

People often say tube amps sound best after playing back a while, but never I have ever experienced that. Playing music after 10 seconds of powering my tube amp sounds exactly the same as when it's been on and playing music past 1 hour or beyond already

I've had the same attitude for the decades I've used tube gear too. However, and possibly due to my newer tube preamp I dunno, something kept happening where I turned on my system and for the first 15 or 20 minutes or so it sounded different, darker and more rolled off. And then almost like clockwork it would suddenly "open up" in the highs a bit more, and so the highs were then more forward, sparkly and airy. Since this perception kept happening and of course I wondered if it was just my imagination, I brought it up in one of the tube amp threads on ASR and I remember one or two technically knowledgeable members said it was entirely plausible there was shift happening in the tube amp operation going from cold to warmed up. I don't take that as gospel, but it was interesting to read.

 

[Snarfie]

Don't know if the MoFi story qualifies as a placebo effect but for sure i had a good laugh about it.
"So digital is ok now"

Mobile Fidelity Analog Vinyl Controversy

I got sucked into this rabbit hole on Youtube, and I can't stop laughing. Basically it's coming out that MOFI has been using a digital step in their remastering since at least 2015, while all these analog "audiophile" snobs have been paying $130 per remastered, reissued LP thinking they're...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[Timcognito]

I've had the same attitude for the decades I've used tube gear too. However, and possibly due to my newer tube preamp I dunno, something kept happening where I turned on my system and for the first 15 or 20 minutes or so it sounded different, darker and more rolled off. And then almost like clockwork it would suddenly "open up" in the highs a bit more, and so the highs were then more forward, sparkly and airy. Since this perception kept happening and of course I wondered if it was just my imagination, I brought it up in one of the tube amp threads on ASR and I remember one or two technically knowledgeable members said it was entirely plausible there was shift happening in the tube amp operation going from cold to warmed up. I don't take that as gospel, but it was interesting to read.

My Audio Research CA-50 (only ever tube amp) does it after about 3 or 4 minutes and none of my other amps ever did or do it. I think it can happen with tubes.

 

[Skeptical_Aus]

The power of the brain to alter sounds is amazing. For example, in two tracks that come to mind (1) What mama said by Jeff Beck (2) I'm afraid of Americans by David Bowie - there is sub bass happening that only my sub can make, but with the sub off I can "hear" my brain putting those sounds back. You can't unhear a sound once you know it's there. I'm not saying the sub is redundant but the brain is doing its best to remind me what's there. Once I read an audiophile explain that only after spending a considerable sum he could hear Nick Cave light a cigarette a few seconds into Red Right Hand. I can hear that on my phone!

 

[kemmler3D]

So I got hold of a variety of component video cables, from cheap to pro grade and up to the Nordost, and did some blind testing. Then the differences disappeared.

I think I found your problem. When it comes to video cables, you can't do it blind, you have to look at the screen.

Don't know if the MoFi story qualifies as a placebo effect but for sure i had a good laugh about it.
"So digital is ok now"

Mobile Fidelity Analog Vinyl Controversy

I got sucked into this rabbit hole on Youtube, and I can't stop laughing. Basically it's coming out that MOFI has been using a digital step in their remastering since at least 2015, while all these analog "audiophile" snobs have been paying $130 per remastered, reissued LP thinking they're...

www.audiosciencereview.com

I mean, we are really glossing over this, but how many people who claim digital sounds bad ever accused them of using a digital process until AFTER it was admitted? ANY? It completely blows up the entire narrative, but apparently the subjectivist audiophile world just shrugged and moved on... This was the largest blind test of audio format ever conducted, from a certain POV.

 

[Tell]

There is probably no music genre that have been more affected by the loudness war than any other, and that is synthwave. And one of the bigger artist is Perturbator, he has to my ears made some really good music, with his The Uncanny Valley being one of the better one. Well at least musically, but absolutely not when it comes to sound quality. According to the Dynamic Range Database most of the tracks have a dynamic range of 1dB. Yup it really sounds horrible ,which is a real shame imo when the music itself sounds so good.
But then one day I found out that he had release a vinyl version of it, and apparently the tracks ranges from 8-13dB of dynamic range! So I managed to find a rip of it and it sounded soo much better, finally I could listen to it without my ears bleeding!
.. buut after a while I realised that it really didn't, it still sounded quite compressed actually. Very compressed! So I did an thorough A/B comparison using Ableton and there wasn't really any difference in dynamic range or soundquality at all, but a slight one in frequency response. Looking at the waveform I did get some clues..

So how come the measurements says something else? Well apparently you can put something heavily compressed onto a vinyl. Just make sure you bandpass it, ie cut some bass and cut some treble and even the most compressed masters can be cut onto vinyl. And there is also some phase rotation going on somewhere in the vinyl chain which combined with the bandpass will give you a waveform that looks different (clipped parts get something slope instead) the makes the dynamic range meters going up while not really sounding that much different. Yet I heard it, oh I heard it so clearly how much more dynamic it was! But nope, the happiness only lasted for a short while

This was quite a learning experience in more than one way. Firstly that vinyl aren't necessarily more dynamic even though some meters might say so, and secondly that placebo really is a thing. I have always been told that vinyls often get a more dynamic master and the DRDB did confirm that so my brain knew in beforehand that this vinyl rip really should sound better.
Placebo is one hell of a drug!

 

[RayDunzl]

Audio Buddy bought a new DAC and brought it over to compare.

I set my miniDSP to the "no settings" preset and plugged his DAC straight to the preamp, and matched levels with a tone.

His sounded glorious, mine just sounded sort of lame when we switched back and forth.

We accepted that, oddly, at first, but...

Took at least half an hour to figure out what was wrong, after admitting that there must actually be something wrong.

Some tunes (on mine) were missing instruments or vocals that would normally be panned far to the left on the recording.

Discovered my "null" preset had a leftover setting from the distant past where I was experimenting with a "crossover" measurement, lows to the left, highs to the right.

Eliminated that, and as pretty much expected, they sounded the same enough to call it a draw.

 

[dwcda]

Little off topic but my best example of placebo effect doesn't involve hearing or music. I read about a supplement called Shilajit. It's a sticky, black, tar-like substance that comes from rocks in high mountain ranges. It has many supposed health benefits, of primary interest to me being increased energy, stamina and focus. I was doing exercises in my home gym in Jan/22 on a Versaclimber when I received my order of Shilajit. The Versaclimber was used by the Russian Drago in Rocky & it's a painful cardio machine that simulates climbing a ladder.

Prior to taking Shilajit I was able to do 5000 feet of climbing on the Versaclimber in about 32.5 minutes. I started taking it on January 6, 2022. I was 60 years old at that time. Over the next 5 weeks my time & overall distance steadily increased until Feb 17, 2022 when I did a session of 12,165 feet in 80 minutes. I managed a few 10,000 foot sessions after that but then it fell off & I was back to my previous normals.

Since then I've tried to recreate that scenario, taking Shilajit & any other supplements that I was taking at the time but I no longer believe in the supplement with the same vigor & it has had no effect. Plus I'm 2 years older & reality is setting in. I don't honestly believe that the Shilajit did anything but at the time I was convinced that it did & therefore it had a huge effect. Your brain creates the reality of your body.

 

[Keith_W]

While listening to my system, I thought that it sounded different than normal. I checked the miniDSP SHD settings and “discovered” that I had somehow imported the “incorrect filter file.” So, I imported the proper file, loaded it into the SHD, waited for the unit to come back online and voila! Amazing sound was once again being produced. Veils lifted, my sonic mastery assured.

Later I reviewed both files just to see what was different. Imagine my surprise when I discovered they were identical internally. Somehow, I had saved identical settings under two completely different file names.

Something similar happened to me recently. I hosted a blind test of different target curves. I made 5 different curves and loaded all of them into my convolver. I then renamed the buttons on the convolver to "A, B, C ... etc" and gave my friends the tablet where they could play their music and load any filter they wanted. During the blind part of the test, they said "either C or D is the best". When the filters were revealed, C was Harman and D was Toole. Further listening and we all agreed that Harman sounded better.

A few days later, I examined the convolver. I had somehow loaded the Harman filters into both C and D.