I've seen 'S' and 'O' thrown around a lot lately.
I thought I might explain a few of my thoughts about this in what I hope is a clear and very non-confrontational way.
My wife is a psychologist and I'm an engineer. I've read a lot on this subject because I find it fascinating. As an aside I credit my wife with much of my success in business because of her insights on what drives people.
People are subjective by nature. None of us can truly claim to be objective about anything.
We are so incredibly subjective about everything that is is very difficult to separate what is real from what isn't. That is all of us including me. I am not taking any moral high ground here or claiming I'm different or better than anyone else.
Getting back to audio, your brain is fooled by your stereo to reconstruct a sound stage that doesn't exist.
You know that you have 2 speakers. I can count them. You can count them.
Yet you can close your eyes and pick out instruments in varying positions that can sound like they are in between and even outside the width of your speakers.
There is subtle phasing detail in a well recorded and mastered music signal that your brain interprets as positional information. This is very cool and we like it!
This is the equivalent of seeing perspective where we pick on visual queues that we interpret as depth perception. Our brains do some amazing things very quickly. Visually your brain "compensates" for many variables around you all the time that generally gives you a reasonable picture of the world around you. Your brain adapts to your surroundings and is always compensating and is very subjective about it. Visually it uses relative contrast to determine color and shadows and parallax to determine depth perception. It is very easily fooled because of the assumptions it is making all the time. These assumptions are correct the vast majority of the time and these assumptions work well for us.
I am not going to debate what each of you can hear or not hear. There are far too many factors that influence what you perceive.
What I'm saying is that none of us can trust our senses to be objective ever. That includes me and every human being on the planet. We are very subjective creatures. That is the only reason that I have suggested that whenever we are comparing how two things sound that we can not know which thing we are listening to when making that comparison.
Our brains are so subjective and so prone to make assumptions about everything, that we can't trust ourselves to be objective in any type of comparison.
This is like the wine tasting competitions in France. For years American wine was rated very poorly because of assumptions made before they opened the bottle. The moment that they had to judge the smell and taste of the wines without knowing the source suddenly the American Vineyards scored much better.
In conclusion I'm not suggesting that you can not hear differences between the many devices that you use to listen to music.
I just highly suggest that you be careful trusting your own assumptions when you evaluate something.
Did I succeed in presenting this in a non-abrasive way, or did I upset people?
I thought I might explain a few of my thoughts about this in what I hope is a clear and very non-confrontational way.
My wife is a psychologist and I'm an engineer. I've read a lot on this subject because I find it fascinating. As an aside I credit my wife with much of my success in business because of her insights on what drives people.
People are subjective by nature. None of us can truly claim to be objective about anything.
We are so incredibly subjective about everything that is is very difficult to separate what is real from what isn't. That is all of us including me. I am not taking any moral high ground here or claiming I'm different or better than anyone else.
Getting back to audio, your brain is fooled by your stereo to reconstruct a sound stage that doesn't exist.
You know that you have 2 speakers. I can count them. You can count them.
Yet you can close your eyes and pick out instruments in varying positions that can sound like they are in between and even outside the width of your speakers.
There is subtle phasing detail in a well recorded and mastered music signal that your brain interprets as positional information. This is very cool and we like it!
This is the equivalent of seeing perspective where we pick on visual queues that we interpret as depth perception. Our brains do some amazing things very quickly. Visually your brain "compensates" for many variables around you all the time that generally gives you a reasonable picture of the world around you. Your brain adapts to your surroundings and is always compensating and is very subjective about it. Visually it uses relative contrast to determine color and shadows and parallax to determine depth perception. It is very easily fooled because of the assumptions it is making all the time. These assumptions are correct the vast majority of the time and these assumptions work well for us.
I am not going to debate what each of you can hear or not hear. There are far too many factors that influence what you perceive.
What I'm saying is that none of us can trust our senses to be objective ever. That includes me and every human being on the planet. We are very subjective creatures. That is the only reason that I have suggested that whenever we are comparing how two things sound that we can not know which thing we are listening to when making that comparison.
Our brains are so subjective and so prone to make assumptions about everything, that we can't trust ourselves to be objective in any type of comparison.
This is like the wine tasting competitions in France. For years American wine was rated very poorly because of assumptions made before they opened the bottle. The moment that they had to judge the smell and taste of the wines without knowing the source suddenly the American Vineyards scored much better.
In conclusion I'm not suggesting that you can not hear differences between the many devices that you use to listen to music.
I just highly suggest that you be careful trusting your own assumptions when you evaluate something.
Did I succeed in presenting this in a non-abrasive way, or did I upset people?