Visual Confirmation Bias


Nice term, Paul. Very impressive. Very scientific.

And original. Well, at least I’ve never seen it before so I’m going to claim it as my own.

Visual Confirmation Bias (VCB) is a variation on confirmation bias that postulates that your brain causes audio gear, particularly speakers, to sound the way they look.

I came up with this idea a week ago when I got my new (used) KEF LS50s. (Note: I’m sure that dozens of people have been talking about VCB for a hundred years. I’m not particularly interested in who preceded me but raising points like that is one of the reasons that this forum exists.)


I had read lots about the speaker and I was expecting accuracy and soundstage precision. Their rich, full sound surprised me. These were not adjectives that were usually attached to these speakers.

I’ve been obsessed with these speakers for the past week, reading about them constantly. I find myself most in agreement with The Absolute Sound, which described the speakers—just after they were released—as possessing a “prevailing sweetness, a harmonic saturation that lends it a dark, velvety overall character, and a bloom that is so pleasing that I began affectionately dubbing it the butterscotch sundae of small monitors.”


But in the years that followed, listener after listener reported a “hard” “bright” sound. And when I look at the speaker, those words make complete sense. A tiny metallic driver in a small box? They look tinny and bright so no wonder some people hear that.

My own strongest experience with VCB: Many years ago, on the pretense of looking for a CD player, I walked into Sound By Singer at its old 16th St. location. After just enough feigned interest, I asked the salesman to listen to something “really pornographic.”

Surprisingly, he was happy to take me into one of the listening rooms. The only specific piece of equipment I remember was a pair of Wilson Speakers. I don’t know which model but they were white and just over six feet tall. Each the size of a restaurant-grade refrigerator. They were somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000.

Then I settled into the listening chair as the salesman started turning stuff on. Preamp, monoblock, monoblock, God knows what else. I just remember him throwing switch after switch. I have to believe all that gear equaled the price of the speakers.

If ever a system should have disappeared, it was this one. If ever the music should have been revealed to me, it was now. But even with my eyes closed, all I could see—and all I could hear—were these huge speakers looming over me. They could not have been more present in my listening experience.

Visual confirmation bias kept me from enjoying the finest pair of speakers that I’ll probably ever hear. The phenomenon is not to be underestimated.
paul6001
Visual Confirmation Bias

It mean what you are seeing, is confirming what you "WANT" to see.

YOU have a preconceived idea how something should look, and by "Seeing it", you have confirmation.

I see wood, I like wood, I buy wood. Words count, ay?
It's not a religion quit yet, give it a bit of time, it will catch on :-)

Regards
Visual confirmation bias are a common place fact in ALL human...

The problem come when dogmatic or simplistic minds use it to negate ALL experiences in audiophile listening...Or in any other human experience...

Adding a weighting factor to explain a phenomenon is one thing, reducing all the phenomenon to this factor is another thing....


i like oldhvymec , i see oldhvymec , i buy oldhvymec , but this does not reduce oldhvymec to be a figment of my imagination.... No more than the increase in S.Q. resulting from my experiments is ONLY a figment of my imagination reducible to my wishes...


By the way this oldhvymec cost only peanuts.... 😊 I recommend to all people to add one to his gear, a low cost tweak.... 😊
Actually ears are a type of simplistic listening device a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption. We listen to frequencies through this contraption and our mind cobbles together these sounds into something coherent at least to those that have grown accustomed to hearing them. Proper listening tests are nothing but one weighing factor some believe can’t tell us anything. The dogma is denying this phenomenon, the simplistic minds are those who believe what they hear without question.
Actually ears are a type of simplistic listening device a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption.

Sorry but it is too much work to replicate to that to someone who really think that this is a real description of this complex phenomenon... Borrow books...

the simplistic minds are those who believe what they hear without question. Report this
When a musician of an orchestra judge the playing timbre of an instrument modifying the compressive force of the strings he judge what he hear without question...

When i hear my speakers in my room producing a better violin timbre after some experiments playing with the dyssemetric compressing of the springs sets, i hear the result without question...

The musician and i are we simplistic minds for that? The musician has his own biases he prefer Guarneri to stradivarius, i prefer my Mission speakers to some other speakers.... Are we simplistic?

Misjudging people by sticking to a decreed opinion about biases, without willing to listen to ANY others experience is simplistic to say the least....

I wil not qualify the Rube Goldberg contraption metaphor and hearing otherwise than child explanation...

Anyone want to comment specifically on the LS50 and it’s supposed forward/bright sound?


All this talk of memory caused me to return to an earlier observation of mine: There seems to be no limit to the lyrics I can recall to songs that a) I haven’t heard for 20 years, and b) never liked in the first place. God knows that I’m not happy about it, but put on a song by The Captain And Tennille or England Dan And John Ford Coley and you’re sure to find me singing along, every ghastly word imprinted on some neuron somewhere in my head.


If I could figure out how to reprogram my brain and put the cells currently devoted to “Crocodile Rock” to more useful purposes, I could solve global warming. Do you suppose that’s Elon Musk’s trick?