@jmalen123
"Perception is reality" ends arguments politely, but it glosses over something crucial: the difference between (1) a perceptual experience being genuine—something actually occurred in your auditory system, the sensation is not imagined—and (2) that experience tracking an external cause—the sensation being reliably produced by the thing you believe produced it. A real experience doesn’t automatically mean a real change in the component.
Three distinct claims often get bundled together in burn-in discussions:
What’s audible. Human hearing has roughly 0.5–1 dB resolution in its most sensitive range. Any change below that threshold is inaudible by definition. "It measures differently" doesn’t entail "it sounds different."
Objective vs. psychological change. Components do change physically — drivers loosen, solder stabilizes. The real question: are those changes (a) within audible range and (b) what you’re actually responding to? Alternative explanations are strong: listener familiarity, reduced novelty-driven attention, expectation effects, neural gain adjustment. These produce genuine perceptual change without the component changing at all.
Controls needed to distinguish them. Blind/double-blind presentation, level matching to 0.1 dB, same-session comparisons (auditory memory decays after ~30 seconds), and pre-registered descriptions of what you expect to hear. None requires a lab.
The point isn’t to dismiss subjective experience—it’s to ask whether it’s evidence of something repeatable and for details of the causal chain producing it.
