Ow pat lol

In that case, it depends on how savvy the people you are trying to fool are.

If they aren’t aware that your control attempt by pressing a non-functional button is a control attempt, it won’t cause conflict and should give you some level of control over their behaviour.

If however they are savvy that you are pulling a fast one, quite possible they’ll beat the shit out of you. And it would be your own fault for provoking them by being a smartarse.

@cheeseweasel 542611 wrote:

There is certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence from mix engineers that DFA faders, dummy equipment etc can be used to fool awkward producers who want to add more ‘sparkle’, ‘sex’ or some other ambiguous adjective into the mix. When I was at uni, an ex-BBC lecturer of mine described to us his ‘flange and bounce box’ – a mysterious home-built unit with a single female XLR on one side and a male XLR on the other. When a producer was being especially tiresome, they would wheel out this device with great ceremony and insert it into the signal path (‘aha – what you need is the flange and bounce box! We only get this out on rare occasions…’). You can probably guess what was inside the box: a short length of twisted-pair cable!

There is a definite psychoacoustic effect at work here – if you are expecting one sound to be better than another, the chances are that’s how you will perceive it. Take the example of audiphools who spend £1000 on a set of gold-plated speaker cables. They are convinced that they sound better than the cheap heavy-gauge copper found in recording studios around the world (N.B. For anyone interested in fancy cables, a good thing to ask yourself before buying them is ‘does anyone in the professional audio industry use these?’ Usually the answer is no). They even find ways to describe the differences: ‘the sound-stage is brought into sharp focus’, ‘the bass is more solid’. They can actually hear a difference. For the extra £1000 you certainly should be able to hear a difference! However, it is all in the mind, and there has not to my knowledge ever been a successful double-blind experiment that has been able to prove that exotic cables sound any better than their cheaper counterparts. Once the knowledge of which cable is which is taken away from the listener, the mind has nothing to go on and no way of playing tricks.

I think one of the most important skills to learn as an engineer is the ability to tell when something hasn’t made a difference. There are various psychoacoustic factors at play when it comes to preference of one sound over another; one being that people usually prefer the louder of two sounds, even if the only thing that is different is their loudness (this is why it is important to set the output gain of compressors carefully when mastering – the louder, but more compressed sound will usually sound better than the quieter, uncompressed original). There are lots of AES papers on the subject, which I unfortunately no longer have access to without paying a lot of money, but as a student you can download for free (Floyd Toole and Sean Olive are two names that spring to mind from when I was writing my final year technical project). There is also a certain level of competition among engineers as to who ‘has the best hearing’, and plenty of ’emperor’s new clothes’ syndrome going on, where if one person claims they can hear a difference between, say, two different pre-amps, nobody wants to be the one to admit that they can’t tell the difference. I try to be mindful of all these things, as I would rather be unable to tell the difference between two sounds than hear differences that don’t even exist!

Probably the precise answer the OP was looking for, shame Pat has likely scared them off.

@cheeseweasel 542621 wrote:

Oh well, I somehow don’t think that ‘some druggy rave forum wot I found on the net’ would count for much in his list of sources anyway.

Pity if he should think that considering your clear knowledge of the topic, you junkie.