The thing about placebos is you can't tell. It's why we do double blind tests. In your last clips the ray ross bridge is a little louder in all the clips. You may not know you're playing different but something like your excitement of playing your choice may make you play just a bit harder. That makes one clip louder and people will chose that. In real tests you can take the same clip, slightly change the volume of one and people will prefer the louder one and this has been demonstrated in lab conditions. Also the order of the clips will create a clear statistical preference. If you know you're playing your hardware of choice your mindset while playing is different. Things like this are why red guitars are louder than blue ones.
The Pepsi paradox is a great example of how knowing what we are consuming will influence our evaluations. Here's some info on that.
How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy
.... At least that is the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the only (so far) classic study in neuromarketing, a fascinating study of what can be called the Pepsi paradox. For decades, it has been known that Pepsi is the preferred cola in blind taste tests, but it is still Coca-Cola that continues to be the absolute bestseller in the U.S. and the rest of the world. However, since 2004, we have been able to see the short-circuit going on in the head of the cola-drinking masses.
The originator of the experiment was Read Montague of Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, who must be credited with breaking through to the broader public with the experiment, which was essentially a cola-tasting while being subjected to MRI. Just under seventy volunteers were first asked to taste the competing products in a blind tasting and, just as so often before, Pepsi was the big winner. Pepsi also set off greater activity in the so-called ventral putamen than Coca-Cola. The putamen is an area cradled deep in the brain in the striatum, which is, among other things, a component in the reward system. So, the interpretation was straightforward–the activity meant "this feels good."
In the next series of experiments the subjects tasted colas with visible labels.
When the research subjects knew which brown liquid was which, almost all of them suddenly preferred Coca-Cola. They were convinced that the taste of Coca-Cola was far superior to Pepsi. This shift in attitude followed an important change in the brain–this time, the medial prefrontal cortex went into action. The cerebral cortex intervened with its higher cognitive processes and triumphed over the immediate feeling of reward that was evoked by the taste impression. The product that actually tasted worse and provided a poorer physiological reward was viewed as better when the whole identification apparatus and the idea
"this is so me" went into action.
The cola experiment, which came out in the journal
Neuron, might be said to show that branding is mind over matter. And, of course, this got marketing people to think in a new way. Now they could hope that the methodology of brain research would help to explain how people build up the much sought-after positive branding story. The dream is that researchers with their
scanners will discover what has to be done to get the right elements into play to achieve a tenable branding.
Storytellingaimed right at the medial prefrontal cortex.
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