So are your experiences wrong? Some differences are real, and maybe you are correct for some interaction with the other gear involved.
That's really the crux of the matter for me, in terms of audio and everything else.
Being of a philosophical bent, I prefer to do a consistency check for things I believe (or will argue for) and before I accept someone else's claim. Reasoning relies consistency and appeal to principles. Anyone saying 'you ought to accept my argument' is asking I accept some principle on which the argument is based. And I can take that principle, apply it to all sorts of other things we accept as rational, and if the line of reasoning results in absurdities in this consistency check, then that is a big red flag. The argument fails the test of reason. Otherwise one is "thinking in a bubble" and not really caring for the rationality of the wider implications of what he is saying.
It's like being in one's own church. (Sorry, my non-religious position coming out in this example): If you ask many devoted religious folks who go to their Church on sunday if they think science is a worthwhile system of inquiry they will usually say
"oh of course! Who would doubt science? It's obviously a very useful form of inquiry." Ok, so why aren't you applying scientific thought to your beliefs?
"Oh, yes, science is food for other things...but it isn't pertinent for MY Belief System!" Inside Church, praying and bolstering belief in your God using a method of acknowledging the "hits" and ignoring the "misses" is just fine.
But this is what you get when you break with consistency.
Likewise you can end up in your "church" in any domain, including audio. In debates with audiophiles taking a purely subjectivist approach - a total confidence in their subjective experience for knowing the truth - they will all say that measurements, and science are wonderful things. But...and here it comes...they don't have a lot to say about My Thing! My Hobby! In audio, subjective experience is supreme!
When you point out the well known problems of bias in distorting perception and why that is a variable to be taken seriously, and why these variables are controlled for in science, e.g. medical studies etc, the reply is typically "
Yes, that's all well and good, but why the heck are you talking about things like medicine or other scientific things? That's not relevant. We are talking about AUDIO, not medicine!"
The point - the consistency check - won't land. This is thinking inside one's church. I am always telling the pure subjectivists that, whatever they want to do, I don't want to pretend audio exists in some magic bubble where the relevance of everything we know about human fallibility just doesn't penetrate. I don't want to approach audio as if I'm practicing religion!
But the thing that's important to realize, I think, is that (insofar as one would disagree with the "church" thinking above) these groups of people aren't thinking this way because they are unusual or deficient. They are thinking this way because they are human. These are just different manifestations of the type of bias we are all prone to. We are good at protecting our beliefs by selectively walling them off, or not bothering to do these wider consistency checks.
Even in the camp that views itself as more scientific, you can still end up inadvertently thinking in "your own church" by not cross-checking arguments in context outside of a discussion of audio equipment. So for instance if you have an argument that relies on accepting the proposition
"We Can Not Trust Our Senses" (without measurements), then that principle will just immediately fail any wider consistency check. It will make much of our success in navigating the world unintelligible, and fail to explain all ways our sense perception proves reliable and informative. Any such argument will have to be far more nuanced, and will have to hold up to wider consistency checks.
And this is the problem I have with how some have drawn the conclusion from what we know about human bias, from experiments using blind controls, from the ability of audiophiles to fool themselves etc, that THEREFORE our perception is not to be trusted, purely subjective accounts of how audio gear performs is to be dismissed as wholly unreliable, and attemps to put what we hear in to subjective language (without measurements) is worthless. This sort of extremism immediately fails all sorts of wider consistency tests - it would utterly fail to explain how people in my line of post sound production get the job done every day (we use our subjective impressions and communicate via subjective description all the time - we don't use measurements or blind testing). It fails countless other examples. It comically fails any test of pragmatism: It would be impossible to put our everyday inferences to such stringent tests, which means it would be unreasonable to conclude we can't be justified in any conclusion we draw from sharing our subjective impressions, without measurements or scientific controls to back it up. Life would be impossible.
But when I bring in these consistency checks some say
"why are you talking about irrelevant things like rational inferences in cooking, or music notation, or talking about creating sound in post production? That's all irrelevant! We are Talking About Audio Equipment Here!!!"
This is, I argue, thinking in a bubble: a failure to recognize basic consistency checks on one's argument. It's born of the same human bias that allows the church goer to think consistency checks extending outside their church life are irrelevant - "how science relevant to my beliefs? I'm talking about religion and the efficacy of prayer here!" and the pure "subjectivist audiophile" to think consistency checks for how their arguments would play in the world outside audio are "irrelevant" -
"I don't have to explain how my argument makes sense in the context of things like scientific research! I'm talking about evaluating Audio Gear!"
Nope. If we are being reasonable, we will be able to account for how our argument in a specific domain - e.g. audio gear - sit's coherently in the wider epistemic project in our experience. We can't wave off these consistency checks as irrelevant. Our beliefs and arguments regarding audio gear don't exist in a Magic Bubble walled off from the rest of rational thinking (or...it shouldn't, IMO).
Sometimes things are different. Tube amps I used were connected to electrostatic speakers I owned. The interaction had considerable changes in frequency response vs a solid state amp and levels of distortion or other non-linearity that made for genuine sound differences reaching my ears. I mostly liked the difference over my ESLs. I have story about series connecting amps, but I've written about it before so won't belabor the point again.
Yep.
In my view the pure subjectivist becomes too extreme in uncritically accepting the account of his, or anyone else's uncontrolled subjective impressions. That very same uncritical thinking about claims is what leads people to believe the astounding amount of crazy in the world.
On the other hand, you can go to far in the other direction where you have a hyper-skepticism about the worth of subjective accounts, and the "unreliability" of our perception.
So one has to navigate between two very real ends of the problem:
1. We have to acknowledge that our perception is not always reliable.
yet
2. It is impractical to demand that, in order to have a reasonable inference from perception, it must always be subjected to scientific controls.
As I've often argued, I attempt to navigate in between these two ends of the problem via acknowledging our confidence levels should scale to the evidence we have, and we can help scale our confidence via heuristics like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." And this would apply consistently to audio as to anything else. If my neighbor tells me he adds more salt to his chili recipe and it tasted more salty, he could be mistaken. But it's a plausible claim so I won't waste precious time requiring measurements and blind tests to accept the claim. But if he tells me he's using "homeopathic" salt - liquid with every molecule of salt removed that retains the "memory" of salt - that's an extraordinary (extremely implausible) claim, so I'll want much more rigorous evidence.
Likewise, if my audiophile pal comes back from auditioning and comparing two speakers and describes the differences he heard, I'm fine with accepting his account. Could he be wrong? Sure. But speakers do sound different, so it's entirely plausible he picked up on those real sonic differences. But if he claimed the same thing for hearing differences between USB cables...then I'll want more rigorous evidence before it would be reasonable to accept his account.
So for Blumlein 88's account above about his tube amps: I provisionally accept his account. Could he have been a victim of sighted bias? Sure! But from observing many technical discussions about tube amps between knowledgeable people, I understand it to be entirely plausible that tube amps can interact with speakers in a way that will have audible consequences, vs say a solid state amp.
On the same grounds, I seem to experience sonic differences between my tube amps and solid state amps in my system. Since this is plausible I'm ok with provisionally accepting what I "hear" though scaling my confidence levels appropriately. I won't put that forth as Strong Evidence. I will want to be intellectually consistent with myself and others, and admit "yeah, it could be in my particular case a bias effect, not a real sonic difference." And if I really want to
scale up my confidence level, I'd want to listen with controls for bias. (Which I actually did for my tube preamp vs a solid state preamp).
