Some mysteries

I'm more than happy to agree that these psychological effects matter. I'm also happy that in the end the musical experience is what matters and even if a placebo effect is involved - well if it works for you, one can consider it part of the system!

My problem is with attempts to generalise personal experiences to others. Fortunately, most manufacturers need reliable, repeatable results and concentrate on the factors they can guarantee will work with everyone.

By the way, what are people's thoughts on the ethics of vendors who sell nicely shaped pieces of wood to hang on the wall for very large sums of money that supposedly dramatically improve speakers by some currently not understood mystical process? More research needed IMO...

elektrikgypsy wrote: And with all that outside interference, presumably the time of day one listens to one's hifi will affect the output. And of course, what time you ate, and how much (hearing being the only sense affected by hunger or satiation). And... well, all the other factors and variables. But there comes a moment when we stop measuring signal, and start listening to music. It *is* subjective. It affects mood, expectations et al and are affected by them. There may never be a good hardcore scientific reason for the change I heard. Or there might be one now. Or in twenty years time. But i'll be listening to better sounding CDs while others are toiling to find those reasons. Bless you. Incidentally, to add a little more perspective (subjective as always), we replaced the power cables on the CD player, phono stage, power amp and sub. If i remember rightly, I could hear a difference on the power amp, slightly more on the phono stage and thought i could barely discern a difference on the sub, but not enough that I'd want to put my hand on my heart and swear it wasn't placebo. The reason I mentioned the CD player in the first place, is that along with the sub it was the component I least expected to hear a difference on, and the scale of difference compared to the other components was notable. Hence my earlier comment that it might not make a difference. But then so much of this is trial and error. What works for one system may make no difference to another. Personally, I believe that science advances through hunches, inspiration and sheer dumb refusal to believe what everyone else tells them is hard fact. Then if something seems to work, the hard work begins of finding out why, and challenging existing theory to that end. Mankind seems to need to be secure and unassailable in its various rationales, but it's in the bits that don't quite fit that the exciting stuff happens.