Actually, Kurt was quoting me in the referenced article, using quotation
marks instead of the QUOTE tags.

Certainly, this change can do no harm and costs nothing.  However,
claiming something makes a big difference in sound, and saying it does
no harm are two different things.  What I was satirizing was the
audiophile bandwagon effect.  That is, someone draws a conclusion based
on an uncontrolled experiment.  Then others, not wishing to be called
"tin-eared" by saying they hear no difference, also chime in with their
agreement, again based on uncontrolled experiments.  If you go back to
the beginning of the thread, the original claim of an improvement was
based on changing two things at once - setting both the digital and
analog attenuations.  One change affects the digital output data
directly, and the other does not.  The claims of improvement will cause
an expectation bias in the experiment, so to get an unbiased picture
requires a test method that removes expectation bias.

I have no issue with people going with what works for them, based on
uncontrolled subjective experiments.  I do this myself with my own
system all the time.  But there is a difference between saying "X works
for me" and saying "X is true".  The difference is that people will
claim these results to be some kind of indisputable fact when no
controlled experiments have ever established that.  The idea is that
once an assertion has been repeated often enough, it is considered to
be true, regardless of the facts of the matter.  This phenomenon is
known rather harshly as the "big lie theory".


-- 
andy_c
------------------------------------------------------------------------
andy_c's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3128
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=26332

_______________________________________________
audiophiles mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles

Reply via email to