A few months ago, our coffee grinder started acting up. If you've ever made espresso at home or when working as a barista at a place that occasionally changed its beans, you know how this works: the coffee doesn't "pull" right and gets really bitter or sour, you get too much or too little grounds, the beans take way longer or not enough time to grind. We tried all sorts of stuff: changed the beans, disassembled the whole machine, played with grind sizes. Ultimately, we decided that the beans were at fault. Disassembling the machine very thoroughly and upping the grind size, returning to our old beans did the trick. But I could swear something about the coffee was not quite right after that.
A couple weeks later, we noticed that our lights were dimming very strangely and couldn't figure out why. It seemed to react to when we used the microwave and the coffee machine, but I wasn't sure because it would seem to dim very randomly. The electric company assured me this kind of thing just happens. Then, one day while the lights were dimming, it just made that pathetic "clunk," you know, that sad noise that whimpers out of a heavy piece of gear when you switch it off. BAD. There was obviously something wrong with the electricity, and we needed to figure out why before I had to cradle my poor dog Zaytoon down the fire escape.
As it turns out, my apartment's electrical connection to ground/neutral was loose. Most places have a kind of U electrical structure centered around this neutral line. Whenever I pulled power from one half of the U, because the neutral was messed up, the voltage would swing wildly, decreasing on the half that was pulling power, and increasing voltage on the other half. Overjuiced stuff starts fires and when I turned on the microwave I was getting readings above 130 Volts, so I had to get this fixed immediately. I did.
It occurred to me later that the random dimming was because aforementioned computer was doing long running tasks going into and out of heavy workloads. Whenever it hit a heavy workload, it would draw more power and the lights would dim. But also, I realized it was the reason the coffee machine was wrecked: the voltage would dip when the grinder went on, demoting its chad-status grind and obliterating my morning ritual.
It reminded me of a classic engineering story called the "Ice Cream Cone Car." There's no way to prove the full story checks out, but it's a great example: a man with a Pontiac has a family ritual where after dinner they all vote on an ice cream flavor and he goes out to buy it. Whenever he buys vanilla ice cream, the car won't start again. But if he buys any other flavor, it works. This sounds insane, but the real issue was that the vanilla was at the front of the store. Because of a mechanical issue called vapor lock in older cars, there's a window of time when the car won't start when it's hot, and the slower time to go to the back of the store and scope out the ice cream flavor gave it enough time to cool down before he went back to the lot.
This kind of phenomenon, where you attribute a problem to one thing but it's really because of another is everywhere. It's behind superstition. It's behind snake oil. It's behind misguided attempts to fix things in all disciplines all over the world! In 17th century Europe, they used to believe that you could apply medicine to the sword that caused a wound in order to heal it. This one actually worked because it meant they left the poor victim alone instead of rubbing all sorts of crazy superstitious snake oil into it causing irritation and infection. The Royal Humane Society in England believed tobacco smoke enemas helped drowning victims, so they put bellows to blow smoke up your ass if you fell overboard. I wish that were the origins of that phrase, but apparently it isn't. This one worked basically because they did a whole bunch of other stuff at the same time and didn't isolate it as ineffective. As late as the 1920's a dude named John Brinkley was implanting goat testicles inside patients for fertility. What a freak. I have no idea if there was a coincidence there but I couldn't resist sharing that I found this when poking around for the craziest examples.
There were a couple of experiments in the mid-1990s trying to figure this out. Researchers blasted a super-annoying 3-kHz tone at people and were told they could use three number keys (1, 2 and 3) to figure out the secret to shut it off. In the first experiment, the solution was typing 21. A matched group had no ability to disable the tone at all: it stopped on a preprogrammed schedule, regardless of what they typed. In a follow-up experiment, it was all a setup and everything was preprogrammed from the get-go.
Most of the people who in reality had no control reported finding solutions, some of them very complicated. In the first study, only 3 people out of 14 admitted they couldn't figure it out, but all of them believed there was a solution when there was none. In the follow-up, more than 75% thought they had a solution (they didn't), and almost everybody else thought they had some control over the course of the preprogrammed experiment. Across both experiments, only one person realized that they had no control at all. Unfortunately, there's no record of anybody getting the solution "type 21," because the experiments were about superstition. All we know is that collectively, people that did have control got up to 78% of the guesses right. So, maybe some people figured it out exactly, or maybe nobody knew exactly but figured it out intuitively. We'll never know.
Have you figured out that I'm going to pivot to pro audio?
You are trying to make the best sounding music you can. People left and right are selling you things. Influencers are trying to magnetize your eyeballs. Famous engineers are telling you secret tricks involving word clocks, metering, oversampling, bespoke analog equipment, bit depth. Your digital audio suddenly has spikes and then it doesn't. A session won't load anymore and it's probably licensing. Or is it the OS update you swear you didn't approve? Or an update to Spotify? There's snake oil all over the place. You're trying not to slip in it. You still spend hours working on a mix and swearing by some plugin or other that you realize is bypassed, or end up somewhere worse than you started 4 hours ago. You're not alone.
Part of your job, I think especially forgotten in audio, is to not get too religious about anything. It's OK to have admitted habits or rituals that keep your confidence up, but it's also important to cast superstition out of your life. To be open to the very simple fact that the phenomenon I'm talking about here exists, you are not immune to it, and that you need to be willing to change your perspective, try new things, and be inquisitive when new information comes to light. Repeating stuff you hear too much, or swearing by something you are honestly not sure you can hear is going to get you into trouble.
I'll say one last thing: the moment any audio advice involves goat testicles, I'm out for good.
