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Well, Clark I agree to a point.

Clark:

You see, most "approval and disapproval" I come to express is based on just what you say: by using my ears. And I do think that I can hear AT LEAST as good as the next guy, meaning that my hearing is not impared and I spend quite a bit of time doing analytical listening (as opposed to just sitting down to listen and enjoy).

There can be NO ARGUMENT when someone makes a claim such as "I heard these discs - they are unique and all sound different".

That is fine. The person used his ears, he heard differences, and according to him THERE ARE differences (even if someone else 'does not', 'cannot', or "WILL NOT" hear these differences.

But for that person to go on to explain that the differences are caused by where the discs were stored - c'mon Clark - you must admit that his hearing ability has NOTHING TO DO with making an assertion like that. He simply cannot tell WHY those discs sounded different. There is no validity to the statement. Maybe CPU load was higher while burning one disc compared to the other? Maybe the CD writer was at an increasingly higher temperature for the subsequent burns?. Maybe operating system processes were cycling in and out as they often do (automatically) - did he save a printout of his PC's event viewer? Was the burn speed FORCED to a finite value, or was it automatically set by the software? Was it fixed or did it float? How come nobody else is asking these questions?

***Maybe the discs are different because of a reason completely unaffliliated with where they were stored!***

And maybe the discs AND their pit geometries are bit for bit identical and the differences are not there at all.

There is a REALLY big difference between hearing something and reporting that, and hearing something and automatically being POSITIVE as to what caused it.

I don't doubt that people DO hear many of these differences that they report to hear. (Or at least HONESTLY BELIEVE that they do.) What I DO doubt (and so do many others) is how they came up with the REASON for why things sounded different to them. If the sun was shining that day, they might say "That's IT - it was because it was sunny outside". Basically they can take ANY of 1,000,000 variables and because THEY chose THAT variable it MUST be the variable responsible for the difference? Right? Exactly wrong.

All I am trying to say here is that if we (as a community) don't look for the REAL reasons why things make actual positive sonic differences we're going to end up with a bunch of "placebo effect" products, treatments and methods instead of discovering the REAL cause behind the improved sonics.

And unfortunately, the power of suggestion is powerful enough to make people THINK they knew EXACTLY what causes the difference in the first place.

Don't distrust your ears. Distrust bad science and poor reasoning.

Cheers,

Presto


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