Given all the talk about Toole /Olive/Harmon measurements, reviewers, subjectivity, etc. I wanted to get a sampling of people's viewpoints about auditory perception.
What I mean by auditory perception is not the physical mechanism of hearing but the neurological processing mechanisms of this perception.
I was going to start a poll to ask two easy questions & maybe discuss some issues leading from the answers:
1. - Are we born with our auditory perception ?
2. - Is our auditory perception learned/formed due to our exposure to the real world?
But I think the poll results would be overwhelmingly in favour of 2, right?
The recent threads showing the Harmon blind tests demonstrate that there is almost universal agreement in a preference for one aspect of speaker sound - the speaker with no frequency anomalies & off-axis sound which has as close to on-axis sound is the preferred speaker (I may have stated this awkwardly so forgive). Now Toole says this of this research & blind testing - I'll paraphrase it into my own words - we all (or whatever high percentage you want) seem to have the ability to settle on the same speaker preference choice & pretty much the same preference rankings in the speakers under test. I think he states that it's because we have an innate ability to recognise accuracy? I don't agree exactly - I think the more correct statement is -we have an exceptional sensitivity to things that are not giving us the correct auditory cues that match to our knowledge & expectation of how audio behaves in the real world. In this particular case the off-axis sound have the same spectrum as the direct sound & will give a realistic reflection from room boundaries.
So what is actually at play here is that we pretty much all have the same internal map or rule base/knowledge of how audio works in the real world & this is our reference for how realistic an illusion is produced by our playback systems. The closer the match to this internal auditory map or rule base, the more realistic the illusion generated by the reproduced sound.
So, here's my quandary - this building of the internal auditory map/rulebase is generated through our contact with the real world & learning how audio operates in this world where all sorts of cognitive biases rule & operate - yet we are constantly told that auditory perception is fickle/untrustworthy/variable, etc. How can it be that we all(?) build the same internal auditory map given this variability?
Edit: Hell I left the poll in place - everybody is doing one it seems!
What I mean by auditory perception is not the physical mechanism of hearing but the neurological processing mechanisms of this perception.
I was going to start a poll to ask two easy questions & maybe discuss some issues leading from the answers:
1. - Are we born with our auditory perception ?
2. - Is our auditory perception learned/formed due to our exposure to the real world?
But I think the poll results would be overwhelmingly in favour of 2, right?
The recent threads showing the Harmon blind tests demonstrate that there is almost universal agreement in a preference for one aspect of speaker sound - the speaker with no frequency anomalies & off-axis sound which has as close to on-axis sound is the preferred speaker (I may have stated this awkwardly so forgive). Now Toole says this of this research & blind testing - I'll paraphrase it into my own words - we all (or whatever high percentage you want) seem to have the ability to settle on the same speaker preference choice & pretty much the same preference rankings in the speakers under test. I think he states that it's because we have an innate ability to recognise accuracy? I don't agree exactly - I think the more correct statement is -we have an exceptional sensitivity to things that are not giving us the correct auditory cues that match to our knowledge & expectation of how audio behaves in the real world. In this particular case the off-axis sound have the same spectrum as the direct sound & will give a realistic reflection from room boundaries.
So what is actually at play here is that we pretty much all have the same internal map or rule base/knowledge of how audio works in the real world & this is our reference for how realistic an illusion is produced by our playback systems. The closer the match to this internal auditory map or rule base, the more realistic the illusion generated by the reproduced sound.
So, here's my quandary - this building of the internal auditory map/rulebase is generated through our contact with the real world & learning how audio operates in this world where all sorts of cognitive biases rule & operate - yet we are constantly told that auditory perception is fickle/untrustworthy/variable, etc. How can it be that we all(?) build the same internal auditory map given this variability?
Edit: Hell I left the poll in place - everybody is doing one it seems!
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