Trying too hard

I am the first to admit my guilt. Sometimes I try too hard to force an outcome. Has that happened to you? A friend suggests you try this tweak or that tweak and you don't really hear the same thing. So you try harder, play more tracks that might exemplify the suggested change. It's easy to confuse focus with convincing yourself. Narrowing the scope of your attention is valuable: listen for the better highs, increased depth, or richer tonal character. But working at hearing something you don't, often leads to false positives. Scientists take a different approach. They work at disproving something, rather than proving it. And for me, that method often turns out more valuable over the long term. It's OK to narrow your focus to one suggested area. In fact, it's almost always required, given the multitude of variables we are presented with. But be wary of convincing yourself something is so, if you're not feeling it. Question everything. If, at the end of your listening trials, you cannot shake the fact that A is consistently better than B, no matter how hard you try, then it's easy to buy into it.