Bad news for audiophiles?

Orpheus, your analogy is (wine) spot on. :-)

Stringreen, yes, a lessor wine can taste better than a higher priced one. Case in point, at the last tasting I went to, the presenter who imports the wine is a Frenchman who's steeped in wine from an early age. His whole life is devoted to it. He now lives stateside and had some wonderful wines he personally selected and none of them were over $50/ bottle. 7 were under $20/bottle (-15% off for the tasting) and all were simply great.

He showed a map of France and all of the regions selected were off the radar, so to speak. None were famous or highly regarded: what he termed "off the beaten path". If not told I would have guessed 4-5 times the price. Easily. He explained that there are many like them out there that never make it stateside, let alone a lot of parts of Europe.

The sad part is, some of these small producers are disappearing in a way you wouldn't guess. Two of them that had been along for a long time and consistently put out fantastic wine were bought wholesale from someone in China and all of the wine now goes there (probably obscenely marked up). He just smiled a little forlornly and said it's all about supply and demand.

All the best,
Nonoise

Nonoise, I take it you didn't see the ads from a certain chi fi company offering a bottle of high end French wine with the purchase of one of their components. So I guess you can get some of that wine for free. Its all about supply and demand.

Who cares? expensive Scotch usually tests better.

Zd542, No, I missed that one. The only upside would be to return the unit for a refund and keep the wine. Of the two, at least one would satisfy.

All the best,
Nonoise

While I have no doubt that expectation bias can often be of significance when it comes to both wine and audio, did anyone notice the markings on the vertical axis of the graph shown at the link Geoff provided in the OP? That axis representing "signal change in mOFC," which was claimed to correspond to activity in the brain's pleasure center.

The biggest difference in "signal change in mOFC" between the wine as believed to cost $10 and the same wine as believed to cost $90, which occurred about 12 seconds after tasting was begun, amounted to about 0.6%. Doesn't sound like much of a difference to me.

Also, I note that even when the wine was believed to cost $90 the pleasure increase went to zero only 19 seconds after tasting was begun. I'd therefore have to think that the wine simply wasn't very good. I wonder what the results might have been if they had used a 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild instead :-)

Concerning some of the broader audio-related issues that have been discussed in this thread, it seems to me to be self-evident that the correlation between performance and price generally tends to lie somewhere in the middle ground between 0 (no correlation) and 1 (perfect correlation). And I wouldn't be surprised if on occasion expectation bias were to assume as much significance as differences in personal preference.

Best regards,
-- Al