hi womaz i'm glad that you are pleased with your stillpoints,i found them a great inprovement to my system .enjoying the music thats what its all about.cheers david
-
Is OLED burn-in a problem? We want your input on one of TV’s hottest topics!
cheeseboy said:
No more should all "heard differences" be put down to placebo, than "unheard differences" be put down to deafness......especially where the item in question hasn't been experienced by the person making the comment.
Both of the above exist, but are not applicable in every situation.
CnoEvil said:
is that the law now? 😉
CnoEvil said:
and you would know this how?
CnoEvil said:
I'll stand by what I said. Placebo. Doesn't mean that people don't hear something different just because it's not making any real world difference
cheeseboy said:
The OP is obviously thrilled with the improvement delivered by the footers, which was validated by two other people in his family who don't have any apparent reason to succumb to the so called placebo effect. So who are you to be the wet blanket?
I can just picture you strolling through an oncology center gleefully telling cancer patients "You may be feeling cured after the chemo, but trust me, the cancer is still in there mate. It's just a placebo effect".
You're a real bundle of joy, aren't you?
cheeseboy said:
I was really talking in general (and about all sorts of products), though it may have looked personal...for which I apologize.
If you have tried a variety of the more expensive solutions, it would be good to hear what they were, what kit they were tried under and what, if any effect they had. This will help put your comments into perspective.
hi cno,have you thought about giving them a try they are very good,also just wondering have ever tryed xlo cabling and i/c,i dont see many people specs with the xlo cabling,just wondering what people thoughts on the cables.cheers david
hifikrazy said:
Google 'double blind testing'.
Introduced by drug companies. They found that in drug trials that even if the patient did not know whether the drug was placebo or not, if the clinician adminstering the drug knew which was placebo, it was skewing the results.
It was established that unconcious cues were being communicated from the clinician to the patient which impacted the patient's response to the drug.
davidvann said:
My spending has been curtailed atm, after sorting out a substantial dry rot problem in my house......so no expensive trials are on the cards.
I have never heard XLO cabling, so can't help.
My advice is to borrow some cables at various prices, try them at home, while remaining sceptical......then don't spend more money, than will bring a bigger improvement by spending it elsewhere in the system.
hifikrazy said:
The 'even my wife/girlfriend heard a difference' line is trotted out on every thread about a dubious tweak. It's such a cliche that no one takes it seriously. No one ever posted about their wife hearing a difference when they changed their speakers.
If these 'tweaks' made an audible difference then that difference could be measured/evidenced. If a quid of stainless steel feet could improve the sound of an amp then every amp would have it as standard. Why doesnt whf use any in its reference kit which is worth about 35k?
Active speakers contain an amp in the box with the woofer moving yet dont suffer the deletrious effects of no stainless steel feet to isolate/couple or whatever.
I limit my 'trying' to things that have some sort of credible/plausible explanation as to how and why they would make a difference.
Womaz said:
I don't mean to criticise your decision to buy the Stillpoints, and I don't want to express a view as to whether they work or not. I just think there's a different way of looking at this situation, and one that at the very least merits consideration -- whether you agree or not is, of course, for you to say.
A £400 'tweak' as compared to a £3-4K speaker upgrade looks like a pretty stark choice, but it can be viewed in two ways. £3-4K may look unaffordable now. On the other hand, £400 put towards a future speaker upgrade, maybe in a couple of years, using any cash you save in the meantime, might arguably be a better long-tern investment.
In other words, does it make sense to invest relatively small sums frequently in very small 'tweaks', or is it better to save up for bigger and less frequent upgrades?
Apologies if this sounds like a moral lecture: it's not meant that way. These are just some thoughts going through my mind at the moment.
:cheers:
Matt
MakkaPakka said:
But then when WHF frequently recommends cable and power cord upgrades to bring improvements, and even includes cables as a category in the WHF Awards, the usual skeptics come up with the same old "difference can't be measured/evidenced, cable effects will not pass a double blind test" arguments.
I just feel sorry for the OP and others like him whose obvious enthusiasm for this hobby of ours has to be blunted by sad grumpy naysayers who stalk hifi forums waiting to jump into every accessories thread with their unwelcome opinions which never seem to convert anybody from believer to skeptic, so I don't understand why they keep persisting. And I don't buy their "I'm just trying to help him save some money" moral justification either.
I guess this is just the world we live in today where the most charming and harmless story or youtube video inevitably degenerates into a bigoted war of words in the comments section, just because some pathetic sods get a kick out of trying to act smart or witty.
CnoEvil said:
I can't remember specifics, (and to be honest, it shouldn't matter as if it works, it should work regardless, not a case of x2 only works with b4 under the conditions of xyz providing the ambient temperature is f type of thing) but when I used to spend a lot of time in the studio we used to mess around with this kind of stuff all the time. We tried to see if we could hear differences between squash balls, wooden isolation feet and metal ones (the guy who owned the studio had some good connections and always was coming up with gear like this to try). We all heard differences between them, but not to say that playing the same song 3 different times in a row and listening hard wouldn't have made the same differences appear. So we then took a feed from the output of the amp in to the computer and recorded with and without, then did an audio diff style exercise on laying the waveforms on top of each other and that showed no differences.
Not very scientific, but surely if the point is that it's making a change to the sound, then something should show up, no matter how small it may be. But it didn't. So we put it down to placebo and moved on with the next toy, which at the time was a big effects processor, so boring experiments moved over to how much can we sound like a Dalek.
Like I said before, the placebo effect is strong and affects people in many ways, and providing the person listening gets something out of it, that's great. It's a very interesting field and non much study has been done in to how and why the body does this, we just tend to know that it does and that it's proven time and time again to have effects in all manner of different walks of life.
The hifi industry has some eye watering mark up on products, and that in turn has a very big effect on people. You only have to look at a site like Alibaba to see how much the manufacturers can knock out all these so called premium products, and then see how much the companies who buy them are charging to the end user.
hifikrazy said:
Ahh yes, the old girlfriend can hear a difference thing. That's it, case over 😛
How do you know they haven't succumb to the placebo effect..? "hey darling, I'm just going put these things under the amp, can you hear any difference?".....
hifikrazy said:
Ahh yes, because buying little bits of metal to put under a bit of hifi kit is *just like* being in a oncology departmartment isn't it??? Christ, get some perspective before you post tosh like that, as quite frankly it's insulting.
cheeseboy said:
Thank you for taking the time to give such a comprehensive answer, and it does indeed show that there is some substance / experience behind your comment (which I respect).
My own experimentation has shown that results greatly vary from product to product, and component to component.
:cheers:
hifikrazy said:
but most things don't pass doulbe blind tests, so not sure what your point is?
for example with regards to reviews, here's some what hifi reviews on some hdmi cables:
http://www.whathifi.com/review/qed-reference
http://www.whathifi.com/review/qed-performance-hdmi
http://www.whathifi.com/review/cambridge-audio-700-series
http://www.whathifi.com/review/cambridge-audio-500
The reviewers found differences with all the cables. However, if you have a look at the testing done here using some of the same cables, they prove (ie repeatable tests that anybody could do) that they are all outputting the same.
http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/home-entertainment/1292371/expensive-hdmi-cables-make-no-difference-the-absolute-proof/3
hifikrazy said:
hobby of yours? What, so people who don't agree with you aren't allowed to be in to hifi now, or have their own opinion? Like it's some kind of exclusive club and only if you believe everything the marketing deparments say has to be taken at face value? It's called differing opinions, and it's what you get on message boards. It's good, and it stimulates people in to differing opinions and viewpoints. The fact you use words like believer only goes to show some form of blind faith, which is odd. As i've said before, I find it strange that people are so quick to embrace the science that gave them the equipment in the first place, then go all picky and choosy on the same science that can show them that what they think they are hearing/seeing actually isn't so.
hifikrazy said:
says the person who went from hifi isolation stands to cancer patients.... hmmmm....
hifikrazy said:
Fortunately, we live in a society where everyone is free to believe what they like. Equally we live in a society where freedom of speech is also permitted.
HiFi is a technical discipline. While you are free to believe what you like, there can be underlying technical arguments that bring into question your beliefs.
You can ignore the technical arguments, that is your choice, but your post suggests that no one should raise points that disagree with your view.
I think that is the wrong approach.
CnoEvil said:
No worries. Like I say, I think the placebo effect isn't really something that one should ignore or say just because it's a placebo it doesn't mean anything (if that makes sense?) or it's not going to work for the end user as it were. Studies have shown that placebos can make people feel better and that's no bad thing in my book. So, if adding something to ones life/system or whatever makes them enjoy it more, great. Doesn't mean that we can't still discuss it, but that's the hard bit - discussing without being dimissive I guess, something of which we're all guilty of, and I'll hold my hand up to that.
The more I read about the placebo effect, the more interesting I find it quite frankly, and in some ways, it's a hell of a lot more interesting than real word tangible stuff 🙂 For an easy example, I can still never get my head around the fact that A and B in this picture are the same colour. I cut them out in photoshop and prove to my brain they are, but my eyes still see different, and I'm actually more interested in why the brain does it, rather than anything else. I think that's probably why people in both camps get their nickers in a twist, as on the one hand we can prove they are the same, but on the other we can't see they are the same. Hope that makes sense?
So long as people are enjoying music, that's the end result we all want regardless of out points of view. :cheers:
cheeseboy said:
Good grief. HDMI cable reviews? I didn't realise they still published these.
I thought that they would have been ridiculed into silence by now.
andyjm said:
In fairness to whf, they don't seem to do them much anymore and didn't have an award for them in the last round of awards.
Alright, I admit my use of cancer patients to demonstrate (or not) a point was rather ill advised. But I just take issue with the fact that the OP was sharing his personal viewpoints on a product that gave him some joy and material improvement, only to be curtly shot down down with a holier than thou "Placebo....If a 10k system can sound better with a few bits of metal lobbed under t'amp....".
The fact of the matter is that you can't prove that his mind was playing tricks with his, his girlfriend's and his daughter's hearing. So any declarations of placebo is insulting to him.
The fact of the matter is that you can't prove that his mind was playing tricks with his, his girlfriend's and his daughter's hearing. So any declarations of placebo is insulting to him.
Similar threads
Question
Help a clueless noob
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram