Good evening everyone,
This really is too much! - “… I know what I hear …”, “… common sense …”, “… I don’t imagine anything else …”. Each of us is a maelstrom of contradictions, with views, preferences, un-founded assumptions prejudices, fears and dogmas changing with the regularity of night and day.
Sometimes I think that my system is really singing, sometimes, not so much. Sometimes I really enjoy listening to artist X, sometimes not. Sometimes I would rather just watch television. There may or may not be subtle or not-so-subtle changes happening in our systems over the course of a day, or a week, or a month, but there are also changes happening in the atmosphere, our minds and heaven knows where else. Consequently, it is very difficult reliably to assign change to a single cause.
The problem, of course, is that it is virtually impossible to carry out a valid listening test in, say, a cable in a genuinely scientific way when it is embedded in a live system. The scientific method requires control of all of the variables, except the variable under test, but this really isn’t practical in a domestic setting - still less in a busy shop on a Saturday afternoon! Indeed, in this thread and others, many members recommend that a potential buyer should try to take home the product in question, to listen with “my ears, my system, my room”, etc. This is a tacit recognition of the need to try to control the variables as much as possible, but I suspect that the most unruly variable is one’s ears. Actually, even assigning this variable to human ears is a very unreliable short-cut. The day’s experiences, the state of inter-personal relations, expectation, wine, what tomorrow holds and all sorts of other things will influence our perception of what we hear today and every day. It’s not the ears, it’s the brain.
Here’s a simple question. If you listened to any of Sinead O’Connor’s music six weeks ago, was your emotional reaction to it the same as when you listened to the same music in the last week? Probably not, but the difference probably didn’t come from any changes in your system - far from it!
Finally, an anecdote – some years ago, I was in the habit of walking in the woods and the mountains with a good friend. Over the course of our conversations through the years, it was clear that, as he looked around at the natural world, he was more and more certain of God’s work. I, on the other hand, was more and more certain that there is no God. (PJL, someone was imagining something and I’ll bet that you actually do imagine some things - in some settings it’s called empathy)
“Burn in - a myth?” is almost certainly very stoney ground indeed.
Best wishes,
Brian D.