[Skler]

Audiophiles seem to obsess on their perceptions of any differences at all,
and tend to perceive any difference as being an improvement. Their
abhorance
of formal tone controls and their infatuation with implicit tone controls
that can only be changed by swapping equipment, seems like a big clue to
their true motivations.


Hi,

Subjective description and metaphor are a big deal now. Even now that FFT
measurements are easily obtained and could illustrate some interesting
differences in performance, especially with regard to speakers, there's
little of that to be found. Instead it's a bunch of poetic description of
the sound, which is great, but you'd think that people who may actually be
above average in their ability to discern audio quality would want to
quantify it some way, as opposed to the typical consumer for which most gear
is probably good enough and they don't care about specs anyway, just
features. Perhaps the fact that so many audio enthusiasts resort to
subjective metaphor instead of physical measurement specs is an indication
that our measurements are not so good after all, at least in terms of how
they relate and correlate with subjective experience. I think
psychoacoustics still has lots of territory to explore.

Schuy