How do you know that you were hearing the ohmic value and not the various physical attributes of individual resistors?
You can't.
Even among units of same manufacturing lot, are they perfectly identical?
Was every solder joint or binding post connection EXACTLY the same?
Moreover,
you changed every time you did a trial. Each time, each cycle, you had more experience under your belt and perhaps different expectations, based on that accumulated experience.
Your moods changed, fatigue and fascination intervene, the vinyl wore and the plastic deformed through various replays, the noise on the AC line changed, the barometric pressure and humidity, and hence the actions of sound in air, changed.
And on and on...
Yeah this is all piddling detail, but so is the very idea of auditioning 0.1 ohm variances in grid resistors. In fact, the whole excercise is made of details, slippery little buggers at that.
The knowledge conditions of this exercise do not allow for any certainty. There are no controls, no stability in the context.
I'm pretty sure that the human flake factor far outweighs the electrical significance of a 0.1ohm change in a grid resistor. That's just how we are and it is neither consciously apparent nor negotiable.
I tell you, as soon as aesthetic listening by human subjects begins, secure knowledge ends,
every time...but especially in whacked-out micro auditioning programs.
So, as Frank Zappa put it, "Who you jivin with that cosmik debris?"
Naive audio forum objectivism is equally unfounded, for many of the same human variability reasons, plus more. The underlying logical positivist model underpinning this sort of brute science was discredited and abandoned by the 1930s.
Look at it this way, even in physics, Einstein's Relativity taught us that there is no perch from which to become a universal objective observer, that's why it is called
relativity!
Two (or more) knowledge systems collide in audio and none wins. It is actually a very complex situation if taken seriously, with a somewhat-technical understanding of epistemological conditions underlying this activity. It is more anthropology than engineering, but engineering is anthropology too from where I sit.
Man has no other way to engage the world except through invisible cultural lenses and filters applied to an ongoing flow of unique historical events.
I am agnostic on others' listening experiences and preferences, do my own evaluation in my own natural use contexts, and maybe I'm learning something while getting progressively more confused and less inclined to decide for anybody else. This feels right to me and does not conflict with my book learnin'.
Or perhaps I should say my e
ducational indoctrination...but it is what I am.
Y'all can go out and get as freaky as you wanna be...as long as I don't have to watch or hear the moans and groans through the wall.
In any case, i would be careful about yanking grid stoppers on high gm VHF tubes because it is an empirically-verifiable fact that such amplifiers can very easily go into mad oscillation on Channel 6, with unknown effects on AF performance.
At VHF frequencies, heater lines are feedback loops, 1/2" cap leads become tuned LC circuits, stray reactances and unintended coupling create a parallel world, and you can't apprehend this underworld with ears.
