Having a nice new shiny pair of expensive floorstanders would definitely put me in a good mood.
Why can’t what people hear just be so? What leads you to believe that it is wrong and needs to be explained by ‘real factors’? You are starting from the viewpoint of ‘that cannot be so - I need to find something else to explain it’ rather than ‘I accept that or at least I remain open-minded about it unless there is clear evidence to the contrary’. The latter seems to me to be a far more rational approach. The former is in fact rather denigrating to people.
An interesting consideration is that you yourself will be subject to the same misinterpretations - unless you consider yourself to be immune from them. That being the case, there is no reference point at all is there? Since you are no more likely than anyone else to interpret things as they really are. So you have no grounds for supposing that people are not hearing things as they really are. How on earth would you know?
So in short, if I say cable X sounds superior to cable Y and you listen and say 'no it doesn’t - it sounds the same. It’s your ears/mood/fluctuations in your physiology or whatever causing you to believe that, then you are no more likely to be interpreting things ‘as they really are’ than I am. You will be subject to the same supposedly interfering factors as I am.
So really your belief here carries no weight and certainly can’t possibly allow you to assess whether people are really correctly interpreting what they are hearing.
Hi, mood doesn’t affect SQ, but does significantly affect enjoyment and receptiveness. To enjoy music it doesn’t need to be of a super SQ, but we can gain more enjoyment, if our mindset is already prepositioned for enjoyment (such as not being stressed), if there are less artefacts or distortions that our brains have to filter through… I suggest especially if we are hearing that music positively for the first time.
I think there are other aspects that might come into play with hifi enthusiasts, such as positive reinforcement from the satisfaction of a well matched and sounding replay system… I suggest this might add to the sense of musical enjoyment if we were already inclined to enjoy it through being in the right mindset. I think this aspect comes into play with me, as I know over the decades it’s been a journey with many twists and turns to get a system that replays recordings that is perfect for me in my music room… it hasn’t been easy… and the painful learning that spending more doesn’t mean it’s better for you… and that learning if your speakers are not right, the rest of your system is compromised and becomes disproportionately sensitive to tweaks and noise profiles … and the months if not years of chasing ghosts. It’s almost like a Zen !
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Spot on.
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Good point I’ll amend the thread title
Que?
Why do you have to keep making aggressive attacks?
I simply observed the that our ears do not hear the same constantly due to physiological effects(which a fact not opinion), which I thought was indirectly relevant to the thread. Afterwards I added a note indicating that differences people hear from time to time and put down to system changes are not necessarily so. I get the impression many people are unaware that hearing can change from day to day, sometimes even hour by hour, but assume hearing is always the same hence commonly assume it is actually the sound that has changed. I did not say that when people hear a change it cannot be the system, but that simoly hearing a change dies nog nean if is the system.
With regard to the rest of your attack on me, where a difference in sound is heard consistently, e.g. swapping back and forth between two thing, then it is unlikely to be anything other than a real change in sound. And for myself, to exclude bias, negative as well as positive), where there may be a significance to my conclusion I double check by blind testing.
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No need. You haven’t said Is it the biggest factor affecting sound quality, but in interpreting it. And interpreting sound quality is precisely what we’re doing. So all good.
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Unfortunately or maybe fortunately I agree. Over the last years my allergy has gotten worse, so much that from april to august I hope many days listening is not really that much of an enjoyment. However with a streaming setup I h have a playlist of tracks I have heard over and over again so I know how they sound so m mood is not that important.
Sometimes it seems there are many days without the enjoyment the system can give, but of course this makes the enjoyment more noticable maybe better when it comes back again.
Claus
This is so true, the rest of your point is totally valid as well but it is the opening part that gets it spot on.
Relaxed and wandering through the park you hear a track you love coming from the battered old transistor radio that a couple are listening too, it puts a big grin on your face as you walk past.
After a very stressful day that grin can be missing when you play the same track your wonderful home system honed to give that all but perfect SQ.
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Thank you, it’s all part of enjoying life isn’t it 
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There is nothing aggressive or attacking in my reply to you. None intended. I think what you said was completely wrong and entirely without any logical foundation and I explained why I think that as comprehensively as I could. That really is all.
For years, I’ve thought of opening a thread on this topic. Thanks for doing it.
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I accept that despite the apparent tone of your post you didn’t mean to be aggressive.
plesse clarify if are you disputing that our hearing is not constant but varies in the short term, sometimes better sometimes worse, and if not, what exactly is it that I said that you believe to be wrong.
Certainly for me, my enjoyment is affected by how bad my tinnitus is on a particular day - or maybe how successfully I can block it out.
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I completely agree that mood is a factor in listening to hifi. However, I believe most audiophiles have been in the game long enough to determine whether it’s a mood change or something isn’t quite right.
There is another psychological element or physiological to some degree. This is what I think affects me. I still hold a previous setup as my absolute favourite. Not because it was technically a better system but because it was my first experience with a highly capable system. ‘The first car you bought’ kind of experience.
Another strange thing in my system is sudden absolute freak instances that I cannot replicate. I think I may even begin a thread on this just to understand if I’m the only one to have had this experience but I’ll give an example.
About 3 weeks ago I had a sudden uplift in my system for a period of three days. I remember thinking at the time ‘I bet this won’t last’. My system sounded ‘alive’. It was reach out and touch kind of sound. Spooky realistic. And just as I had predicted my tubes failed in my DAC after 3 days. So I replaced them like for like and the sound was NOT the same. Everything else was the same. I have tried to search Google to find out if tubes suddenly provide a boost in sound before they fail but nothing I read suggested that so I’m left confused as to what provided that boost in my system.
Another factor, for me at least, is that mood influences my choice of music to listen to. SQ does not influence this decision, but it does affect my enjoyment of the chosen music.
Oddly, this week I’ve gone back to listen to some Chopin; normally I would choose Bach, but I heard someone on Desert Island Discs recommend the Nocturnes. They certainly aided me in getting to sleep.
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I agree completely that our hearing varies. Perhaps I misinterpreted the meaning of what you said.
I took this to mean that you are saying that if someone, for example, thinks there is an improvement in performance by lets say placing cable lifters under a mains cable, then they are in fact experiencing a change due not to that but rather to a variation in their hearing, and so they are wrong in claiming that it is due to the cable lifters. Apologies if I’ve misunderstood what you meant - but that’s what it sounded like to me.
No, I was more thinking of things like up and down shifts in sound quality when things haven’t been changed then changed back.
Apology happily accepted.
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Understood. 
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I agree with your comments about mood and music selection, we share different tastes in music but that’s absolutely normal .
Music can definitely change my mood quiet dramatically, normally always for the better unless I’m having a really bad day 
Bit of light hearted dance music helps with the housework, music can be such a pleasure and an aid.
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