Tell people $10 wine costs $90, and they think it tastes better

CNET has an article about a Cal Tech study that shows the same wine tastes better to people if they think it cost 90 dollars instead of 10 dollars. The lede to the article is “In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee…” No kidding. People selling into the audiophile market have understood this for decades. My pal maintains that our minds and bodies are one inextricably linked system. He says every cell in our brain can affect every cell in our body and vice versa. It is important to understand the results of this study. I think it means that the wine really does taste better; the test subjects truly enjoy it more.

The same goes with the golden-ear audiophiles. When they spend $50,000 on an amplifier or when they paint the edge of the CD green, they really do hear better music. But it is only better to them. Like many psycho-acoustic phenomena, if you don’t believe the $50,000 amplifier is better; double blind studies have shown that nobody, not even the audiophiles, can tell it from a 100 dollar amp.

Now you can see why engineers have such a hard time understanding the audiophile crowd. We take the distortion measurements, we do the jitter analysis, and our brain tells us that is the determining factor, not the cost. Our technical training has made us skeptical of claims that dipping your wall outlet in liquid nitrogen will make your stereo sound better, but as I have blogged, there are thousands of people who pay enormous sums for bogus technology. But that is what we tech types have to understand, the technology is bogus, but the sound is not — the people who pay all this money actually hear better sound through all these crackpot devices.

I have previously drawn a parallel between this audiophile phenomena and Gulf War Syndrome. When veterans of the first gulf war came home, many started developing a range of mysterious symptoms. The VA hospitals could find no disease or physiological cause. And as time went on and the vets talked and read their own stories, a similar spectrum of symptoms kept cropping up amongst them. This is similar to stories of alien abductions. When people started reporting these alien encounters, the aliens were describes in wildly divergent terms. After the story got some legs and people read about it, pretty soon all the aliens conformed to the big-eyed, hairless dwarfs like in the movies. Since people expected to see that, that is what they saw. Some people think they have Morgellons, doctors think it is delusional parasitosis. I’ve known some biker meth freaks so I tend to believe the doctors. Rather than saying “delusional parasitosis” we prefer the descriptive terminology: “he’s spun to the hubs”.

The brain is a powerful thing. When veterans were told that their illness was psychosomatic, they were angry, insisting that it was not all in their heads or imagined. And they were right, doctors pointed out that they really were sick; they really were suffering. And it was the amazing power of their brains to make them sick because they expected to be sick, just like somebody that pays 800 dollars for an RCA cable expects to hear better music.

So try not to get too exasperated with your audio nut pals when they tell you how much they have spent for their systems and how good it sounds. It really does sound better to them. Me, I’ll stick to zip cord for speaker cables and a $99 stereo receiver I got from Fry’s, although I heard a demonstration at ESS the other day that has me thinking about going quadraphonic, their stuff sounded really good to me, but then again, they had the specs to back it up.