Difficulties in assessing the quality of yours or other Hi Fi Systems?

An article that appeared in the Times a year or two ago described an experiment carried out by two Universities to establish how bright a selected group of people were and how bright they thought they were. (See below) The results confirmed all our worst suspicions; The dimmest  of us overestimate  our abilities in inverse proportion to dimness and the brightest do the opposite. The experiment also concluded that unless people understand a subject they will not be able to judge another’s knowledge of it.

More recently I was sent a report on another University’s experiment (See further below). This time a group of wine experts were given two glasses of wine from the same bottle and told that one was $90 and the other $10. Their brain waves were monitored and showed that they’d decided the more expensive one was better before they’d tasted it!

Finally we found a website  http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/sine-wave-speech/ which shows how your ear/brain processes the information it receives so that it understands it. The experiment plays what it calls Sine Wave Speech, which consists of incomprehensible  whistling, then it plays what’s actually being said and finally it plays the incomprehensible whistling again, but and it’s surprising, this time you understand it. We’re pretty sure that the same thing happens with Hi Fi. Enthusiasts adapt to their systems without realising it and they convince themselves it’s wonderful and everything else isn’t.

One may ask if it matters that someone is perfectly happy to listen to something that’s not very good and the answer is probably not, but if these same people are reviewing Hi Fi, then it does because they will be giving bad advice and ultimately driving people away from the hobby, which is what has been happening. What is also clear is that although we may think we’re enjoying our systems, subconsciously we may not be. We may be listening less and at progressively lower levels, or we may have decided that many of the recordings we’re buying aren’t of acceptable quality. Forums are littered with people asking for re-assurance that they have the best, asking how to get the best from what they know is best but doesn’t sound it, or even finding that their iPod sounds better and asking for advice on redressing the balance.

The fact is that if something is less clear and less realistic to listen to than we need it to be, we subconsciously “process” it so that it is. Although we don’t realise it, this is tiring and may eventually lead to our losing interest. The better a Hi Fi system is the more relaxing it is to listen to and for longer periods. However it can be extremely difficult to recognise significant improvement in another system that  sounds very different to our own and this is because our ear/brain combination thinks it’s still hearing ours and needs to adapt.

For many years now many Hi Fi enthusiasts have believed that if they are enjoying the music or can tap their feet to it, then it must be a good system, that measurements mean nothing or worse still, engineers do too much measuring and not enough listening so can’t possibly do a proper job. All sorts of other utterly daft notions have been spouted by enthusiasts and reviewers alike and it benefits no one except Charlatans selling cables or claiming mystical properties for what are often decidedly ordinary products under the skin.

We believe you need to  understand the experiments we’ve described and what they mean if you are to have the best chance of improving the sound of your system.

What we think you ought to bear in mind:

1. That if you don't understand the technicalities you will not be able to judge the quality of the advice you're being given and probably not the equipment either.

2. That your perception may be altered by an inflated price.

3. That your ears play tricks with you that may prevent you from recognising something much better when you hear it. You'll be subconsciously "correcting" your own system and may not be able to stop this process when you hear something new, especially if it is very different.

 It is depressing to see even Reviewers appearing on Forums who sadly lack understanding  and show a bias towards the “alternative”. Their subjective, non technical, anything goes approach has contributed much to the public's perception of hi fi enthusiasts as a dotty and in part, may account for the lack of progress in improving sound quality when compared with either  Pro Audio or even iPods. Here not only have there been big improvements but tumbling prices as well.

Ignorance is bliss for the truly inept
By NIGEL HAWKES
SCIENCE EDITOR

TWO American psychologists have discovered that incompetent people have no idea how inept they are. In a study that will confirm many long held prejudices, they have found that whereas people who can do things well underrate their abilities the truly incompetent remain in blissful ignorance.

According to David Dunning, of Cornell University, and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, this makes them suffer twice. “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but also their incompetence robs them of the ability to realise it,” they write in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The skills required for competence are the same skills necessary for recognising it, they say, after carrying out tests.

They found that those who scored in the bottom quarter in tests of logic; grammar and humour were also those most likely to have delusions of competence, grossly overestimating their own abilities.

Asked to evaluate how well they had done at the logic test, those who scored in the bottom eighth reckoned that their ability was in the top third. Those in the bottom tenth in grammar also considered that their ability put them in the top third.

Those who really were in the top third, however, tended to underestimate themselves.This is because, in the absence of information about how well others do, highly competent people tend to assume that others are just as competent.

When shown other people’s work, however, the competent soon revised their opinion; but the incompetent did not - some even inflated their self estimates. The results, the psychologists say, support the assertion by Thomas Jefferson that “he who knows best knows how little he knows”.

What, though, if Dunning and Kruger are incompetent and have failed to recognize it? In the report they acknowledge that possibility. “This article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors or poor communication,” they write. “Let us assure our readers that to the extent the article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.”

Wine price test shows marketing at work in brain 

Researchers in California have shown that you can increase a person's enjoyment of wine by just sticking a higher price on it.

In a demonstration of the power of marketing, researchers in California showed you can increase a person's enjoyment of wine by just sticking a higher price on it, according to a study released Monday.

Antonio Rangel, associate professor of economics at the California Institute of Technology, led a team to test how marketing shapes consumers' perceptions and whether it also enhances their enjoyment of a product. 

They asked 21 volunteers to sample five different bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and rate their taste preferences. The taste test was run 15 times, with the wines presented in random order. 

The taste test was blind except for information on the price of the wine. Without telling the volunteers, the researchers presented two of the wines twice, once with the true price tag, and again with a fake one.

They also passed off a 90 dollar bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon as a 10 dollar bottle, and presented a five dollar bottle as one worth 45 dollars. 

Aside from collecting the test subjects' impressions of the wines, the researchers scanned their brains to monitor the neural activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex -- an area of the brain believed to encode pleasure related to taste, odors and music. 

The study found that inflating the price of a bottle of wine enhanced a person's experience of drinking it, as shown by the neural activity.

The volunteers consistently gave higher ratings to the more "expensive" wines. 

Brain scans also showed greater neural activity in the pleasure center when they were sampling those "pricey" wines, indicating that the increased pleasure they reported was a real effect in the brain. 

"It's a common belief among scientists and economists that the quality of the experience depends on the properties of the product and the state of the consumer; for example, if a consumer is thirsty or not," said Rangel. 

"But what this study shows is that the brain's rewards center takes into account subjective beliefs about the quality of the experience. 

"If you believe that the experience is better, even though it's the same wine, the rewards center of the brain encodes it as feeling better."

In other words, "people's beliefs about the quality of a wine affect how well it tastes for the brain," he concluded. 

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.© 2008