I think you are perhaps being deliberately obtuse here…
This is what I said:
I thought that was perfectly clear enough TBH. But let’s consider things further in the light of your other comments:
I agree that an open mind is always the most sensible way forward. However, questioning yourself as to whether what you are hearing is possibly a coginitive bias is rather an absurd way to proceed IMO. The sensible way is to trust your ears. If later something happens to cause you to re-evaluate your experience then so be it. But to approach things from the perspective of ‘I really can’t trust what my ears are hearing’ is not a normal way to be IMO. How do you go about choosing new equipment? If you can’t rely on your ears then what criteria do you use? Do you choose things by the way they measure rather than the way they sound?
Do you think this approach of questioning one’s senses is confined to hi-fi only, or does it have a wider application? I can’t understand why anyone who doesn’t question their senses in all areas of daily life would single out their hi-fi system as being an area of concern. Why - what makes it different from anything else?
For example, if you see someone walking down the street do you question what your eyes are telling you? Could you be suffering a hallucination? Are they really there? Your approach means that you would have to. I personally don’t regard that as a normal and healthy way to be. My approach is that I trust my senses.
If on the other hand lets say CCTV of the scene showed that you were in fact the only person in the street then it would be necessary to re-evaluate your pereception in the light of this.
But let’s suppose that we listen to a fuse one way round in our system and hear an improvement and we do indeed choose to take the view that what we are hearing may be a cognitive bias as you put it. How does that help us? We may listen to the same fuse the other way round and hear exactly the same thing. So that proves that the fuse is not directional right - because it sound the same both ways round. Well no. Because how do we know that the fact that we don’t perceive a difference with the fuse the other way around isn’t also due to cognitive bias - and that there rsally is difference. We don’t.
So you can see that taking the stance that you seem to be suggesting, ie. of questioning what one is hearing, is really of no benefit and just ties us in knots. It means we will never be able to make any sensible choices in our systems.
To give you an explicit answer, no we can none of us ever be sure that what we hear is not due to this bias, that bias, or whatever. But the only sensible way to proceed is to assume that we can trust our ears and that what we hear is so. If something happens later to cause us to take another view on a specific perception then so be it. But that is no reason to mistrust every perception of what we hear. And to do so is fruitless.
So in short, if you believe fuses are directional because you hear a difference then you are right. If you believe they are not directional because you don’t hear a difference then you are right too.
But to believe fuses are not directional because you think that someone who says they are is experiencing some sort of pyschological bias is completely illogical.
