Archimago wrote: > Beyond that, I agree, there is no value in much of the subjective > reviews out there when it comes to adjudicating sound quality. > > I think what is fascinating is how seriously the subjective reviewers > take themselves and their opinions. I think that part of the problem is that there is an entire bogus conceptual scheme built around the audiophile hobby about the nature of hearing and the listening process. Once it is acquired it is quite difficult to "un-learn".
In essence it is based around a set of tacit assumptions that human beings are a sort of sound quality detection advice and that fluctuations in one's listening experience must be caused by variations in the sound pressure waves reaching the ears. On this model thinking that two things sound different is like thinking you can see someone else in the room- a perceptually based conclusion which can only be mistaken as a result of extraordinary disturbance of the perceptual system/hallucination etc. The curiosity is that even the most superficial acquaintance with the basics of perceptual science would immediately uncover this conceptual error. I have noticed that even some very smart people in the industry (some of them engineers and scientists in other disciples) seem to lack any curiosity about how perception works. It is quite difficult to persuade people with so little intellectual curiosity to rethink their position as to what it may mean to say that measurements "can't explain" what they hear. One could go on, but the gist of it is that the level of understanding of perceptual science required to see through the entire subjectivist canon is about the same as the level of understanding of physics required to understanding that cartoon characters do not obey newtonian mechanics. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ adamdea's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37603 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=108132 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
