Credibility

Morning! Issue 5 of Copper Magazine just shipped. Hope you have a chance to give it a read. I had mentioned in yesterday's post that a now famous test conducted by Meyer and Moran, and published in the prestigious AES Journal, offered proof there are no sonic differences between CD and high res quality. After publication there were the expected howls and cries from us Audiophiles - exclamations met with contempt from the scientific community. A few people I greatly respect applied some reasoned criticism such as this from Stereophile Editor John Atkinson. I can easily see why these tests failed to demonstrate differences by just looking at their setup, and I am sure you can as well. But there's a bigger issue I wanted to touch upon, credibility. We typically find opinions and conclusions more credible when someone with more knowledge or experience than we have makes them. And this willingness to believe others, even if it goes against our own experience, is built into our very cores for good reason. As we grow and learn, we have to rely upon the knowledge, experience and wisdom of others: our parents, teachers, leaders, shamans, tribal elders, etc. What's fascinating to me is how we select that which we allow to sway us. We've all seen examples of scientists misleading us, often out of just being wrong, but other times trying to sway opinions. I remember some of the more egregious examples: tobacco companies funding studies of how safe smoking is, leaded gas is not a danger to our health, and so on. As we get older and more experienced, we need to learn to trust our own observations - or certainly questions scientific "proof" that what we know to be true isn't. We're not always right, and neither are the scientists.