Pro 'Burn in' time.

[thumb5]

...
Actually, I can see two sides of this argument.  Many times I have seen one person reporting that they have tried A, then tried B and noticed an improvement.  Then someone comes along and says 'it's just expectation bias'.  OK, sometimes it might be expectation bias, but if I were to say that I listened to a full dCS rig with 100K amps and speakers and found it to sound better than the same song played via my iPad speakers, this would be because it does indeed sound better, so expectation bias does have it's limits.

Yes, I take your point.  By way of counter-argument: I'd be surprised if you couldn't also measure an objective difference and/or distinguish between the two in a blind test -- isn't that really what you mean by "does indeed sound better"? -- so there would be no need to appeal to expectation bias anyway in that case.

I do recall a microRendu thread on the Roon forum, whatever anyone said something about how the thing sounded, one guy responded 'it's just expectation bias', this gets annoying because although expectation bias exists, it works two ways and does have it's limits.

Just to be clear, by referring to psycho-acoustics I'm not trying to diminish what anyone hears, nor am I saying that it's necessarily expectation bias (which often seems to be used in a pejorative way, unfairly I think, because it implies some kind of lower-quality listening ability).

Overall, I think my stance could be summarised as: if one hears a difference, and it can't be measured or explained objectively, then it's most likely in one's head (which is of course still real).  Corollary: I don't feel the need for any as-yet-unknown-to-science effects to explain differences in what people hear.

Probably the most interesting area would be sound differences that can be repeated in a blind test but are not objectively measurable.  I'm not sure what, if anything, currently falls into that category.   Maybe amplifier burn-in...?  [he says, in a desperate attempt to get back on topic...]