BatUtilityBelt wrote: ↑Sat Feb 19, 2022 4:59 pm
Chocol8 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 19, 2022 4:01 pm
I have been involved in double blind testing with hundreds of people including at a university auditory lab. Like every other human you can’t hear what you think you can. I will repeat for the last time, recruit some friends and have them test you with a double blind test.
You brought no insult this time, so I will address that argument now. You assert that we all hear the same, but some of us fool ourselves into thinking we hear something that is not there. I do think that happens to people on occasion, but not to the ridiculous degree that's what everyone is doing all the time. Your position implies we're all the same and those of us who don't agree with you are fools. Nah. We have differences, significant ones.
What a boring world this would be if you were right. There would be no great athletes, no innovators, no virtuosos. The fact is we have people who break out from the crowd despite equal efforts because we weigh our experiences differently and we have vastly differing abilities. We are not all just the same. We each have our own strengths and weaknesses. If we lean into our strengths and try to compensate for our weaknesses, we better ourselves. We hear things differently, see things differently, taste things differently, etc. More importantly, we make associations between senses differently. There is plenty of overlap, but it's the differences that make art art. If we take your position, only someone claiming superiority on a nebulous basis excels. No thanks.
I never said we all hear the same, but I will say we ALL suffer from auditory hallucinations all the time in our daily lives. Even people who are aware of it and study it are just as susceptible. And despite how much we like to think we are all different, we all have many of the same shortcomings in common. A huge one is we all hear differences that aren’t really there because our brains trust our vision and our past experiences more than our ears. I am not making this up, it is a well studied field.
Yes, there are some people with better hearing. Some who can hear difference that others cannot. Still, there are bound ranges our abilities fall into and there is no one who can hear better than good microphones. We can easily measure things we can’t hear, and there is nothing we can hear that we can’t measure. There is no magic in audio.
As I have mentioned a number of times, I used to make a lot of money from people in the hifi world who were so convinced they could hear things they would bet real money on it, only to fail miserably when other cues were removed. I later became friends with a guy running a hearing neurology lab at a local university, and observed and participated in some other interesting experiments. Never came across someone with truly golden ears.
In this case, I don’t disagree that there is a real measurable difference between two different Les Pauls, but you really have to strain to hear it, if audible at all, and it wouldn’t take much compression and background noise to make it completely inaudible.
When you hear big differences between guitars, you are hearing different pickups (including differences between two of the same model), different setup (pickup height), different cap and pot values (even if labeled the same), and different wiring (50’s vs 60’s), and obviously different strings.
The differences beyond that are super subtle. SOMETIMES you can hear the difference in an AB test, but put one sample into a mix and ask someone which it is without a reference, and forget it. Ad MP3 and or YouTube compression and it’s even worse. I know, I have tested it myself and with people who have better (measured) hearing than I do and a lot of experience listening.
There is no point in further arguing. People will either choose to test for themselves and know what they can and cannot hear, or choose to believe on blind faith. Most will always choose the second option. Reminds me of an old quote whose source I can’t remember…”it is far easier to fool someone than it is to convince them that they have been fooled.” Human nature…we can’t escape it.
