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A response, and a very serious question in return.

Ethan,

It's so much simpler to be back discussing a specific tweak :-)

""But even that doesn't make sense because a knob that resonates is not in the signal path."

Not sure that it isn't in the path. If one considers room surfaces as within the path, then the surface of the knob is a minor room surface…

But I know what you mean and I'm not sure that being in the signal path in that way is necessary. We know that unused musical instruments in a room can resonate when music is played in a room, and a Helmholtz resonator surely does. If something in the room resonates loudly enough, then it can affect the sound.

How loudly would it have to resonate? Well, at least as loudly as any overtone of an instrument/voice in a recording that's contributing to the tonality of the instrument/voice as we hear it. That means it doesn't have to be anywhere near as loud as the fundamental note in order to produce colouration since some overtones which contribute to the tonality of an instrument are quite a bit down in level from the fundamental (at extremely low frequencies, some overtones are also higher in level than the fundamental).

So, can a knob resonate that loudly? I don't know and it may well depend on the wood used and the frequency content of the music being played. At least that's a nice, clear cut and practical question for someone to attempt to answer and, if the answer is 'yes', then there's definitely nothing mysterious or unexplained about the phenomena.

As to how I account for people hearing differences with the chip? Well, if it really doesn't do anything as we suspect, there are at least three possible explanations I can think of. The first is the one that always gets trotted out - people believe there's a difference because they want there to be one. I've got no problem with that phenomena as a cause — I just don't think that account will explain every report. I think some reports may well result from the 'peer pressure' which can occur when someone listens in a group with a number of others who are convinced that it causes a difference, and allows themselves to be convinced by the others rather than their ears. I think some people may simply make a mistake listening to unfamiliar music on unfamiliar systems in a poor environment at a show. Tiredness and fatigue may also simply contribute to people making a mistake.

There are quite a few reasons for people making errors of perception and I think it is wrong simply to assume that everyone who does is gullible. That view simply doesn't have credibility for me.

And another reason for rejecting gullibility as a reason for everyone who reports hearing a difference doing so is that if that's how we explain that phenomenon, the 'inverse' of that explanation is going to end up being our single explanation for why some people don't report a difference when there genuinely is one - they don't report one because they simply don't believe in it. We have no worries rejecting that view - some people simply may not have the hearing acuity required, especially those with hearing impairments of some kind; test circumstances could have partially masked the difference; some people hesitate to report a difference they're not certain about; and once again simple perceptual error due to factors like tiredness and fatigue.

So, to my question.

Why is it that as a group we seem more willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who fail to hear a difference that is there, wtiting that off as honest mistakes of one kind or another, than we are to those who think they do hear a difference that isn't there? Now there is a really interesting question which I think is critical to understanding why tweakers seem to excite such strongly antagonistic responses. I accept that there are going to be some tweaks where gullibility is much more of an issue than with others, but many tweaks don't fall into that category and many 'critics' simply can't see that there is a huge difference between how one considers a tweak like the chip and a tweak like acoustical treatment of a room or even just sitting on a higher or lower chair and changing one's position in relation to the speaker's driver array. Given the nature of the extremes in any individual difference that exists amongs humans, I have a sneaking suspicion that there may be as many people out there who are willing to dismiss any tweak out of hand, regardless of its basis, as there are people willing to accept any tweak out of hand, regardless of its basis. That just seems to be the nature of human difference - a relatively symmetrical bell curve distribution either side of the mean. Why shouldn't it apply here as well and, if it does, why are we generally more tolerant of people at the extreme on one side of the curve than we are of those at the extreme on the other side?

David Aiken

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