Audiophile Street Cred and the "Golden Eared" Audiophiles

caesar said:

What is the historical meaning of the term "golden ears"? Has anyone met one? Does it refer to all audiophiles, or just to a select few who have distinguished themselves with their abilities?

And how does an audiophile or dealer or a reviewer or an audio designer build their cred, anyways?

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According to Wikipedia:

"..A golden ear is a term in audio circles referring to a person who is thought to possess special talents in hearing. Golden ears claim to be able to discern subtle differences in audio reproduction that most inexperienced and untrained listeners cannot, much like trained wine experts claim to discern differences among wines inexperienced tasters cannot."

Of course, these special golden ear abilities can be quantified and tested via controlled listening tests, listener training exercises, or by audiometric testing of the listener's hearing. This is something we routinely do at Harman. We train listeners to discriminate and reliably report subtle and not-so-subtle characteristics of reproduced sound. Listener performance is various listening tasks is statistically quantified, and from this, we can objectively select the most discriminating and reliable listeners (see Figure 3 in this posting showing the relative performances of trained versus different categories of untrained listeners based on discrimination and reliability in a loudspeaker test).

We also screen our listeners for hearing loss before they are considered as candidates for participation in training and listening tests. If you can't hear the sounds being reproduced to begin with (ie they are below your threshold of detection), then your chances of being a discriminating and reliable listener are greatly diminished. The relationship between hearing loss and reliability in loudspeaker listening tests is documented in Floyd Toole's book AES papers, and in his book "Sound Reproduction".

And since hearing loss is related to age (prebycusis) and constant exposure to loud sounds, many older audiophiles, audio reviewers, audio designers and recording engineers/producers, are probably not detecting all of the reproduced sounds that a younger person with normal hearing is detecting.

I once debated a guy in an audio forum who claimed that the problem with 12 gauge Zip Cord is that it is "rolled off."

I produced data which shows that given a representative load, 12 gauge zip cord only varies from flat by some fraction of a decibel.

Then, I produced data which showed that human ears could not detect such a variance in any case, but especially during music playback.

The guy responded that if you have really good ears, you can hear it and then assured me he had the type of ears that could.

I would say that guy was a perfect example of golden ears.

I, however, was quite offended when he refused to believe I could perform similar feats like lighting fires with my heat ray vision.

As Sean eludes, I think there are two categories here, blended into one:

1. Trained listener. I believe many people can be trained to hear better and ultimately hear things that majority of the public has problem hearing. I used to be one of these for perceptual audio although I don't know if I still am .

2. Golden Ear. I consider these people to have broader but perhaps not as tuned of a skill as trained listeners. I expect them to have a natural ability to hear artifacts of all kinds. People would call me Golden Ear but I would always correct them that I was a trained listener.

To me, it is fascinating to learn what artifacts could be there. My style is to teach the principal and then highly exaggerated version of the artifacts. And then work down toward smaller and smaller artifacts.

Even more fascinating was being able to naturally branch out of the core area of training. It seemed that by learning to hear, I could hear other artifacts I did not expect. So maybe the two categories above do blend into each other .

rsbeck said:

I once debated a guy in an audio forum who claimed that the problem with 12 gauge Zip Cord is that it is "rolled off."

I produced data which shows that given a representative load, 12 gauge zip cord only varies from flat by some fraction of a decibel.

Then, I produced data which showed that human ears could not detect such a variance in any case, but especially during music playback.

The guy responded that if you have really good ears, you can hear it and then assured me he had the type of ears that could.

I would say that guy was a perfect example of golden ears.

I, however, was quite offended when he refused to believe I could perform similar feats like lighting fires with my heat ray vision.

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Good one! Of course, you could have tested the Golden Ear's ability to reliably identify 12 gauge zip versus 10 gauge zip (or some other well-made cable), and that would hopefully put the question to rest regarding his claims about the 12 gauge being rolled off in HF.

What you are saying, I think, is that Golden Ears tend to fall into a category audiophile that believes they possess extraordinary ability to discern small differences in sound quality, but are unwilling to provide hard evidence of this talent.

A parallel would be wine judges who are often chosen to judge wine without showing prior evidence that they are qualified. Recent studies have shown that many wine judges are actually very poor when it comes to giving consistent ratings of wine. See Consumers warned over consistency of wine reviews.

I tend to think that subjective audio equipment reviews generally fall under the same category as wine reviews. There are some notable differences between reviewing wine versus audio equipment; the sonic performance of the audio gear can be largely predicted through a proper set of objective measurements. Yet, some audio magazines continue to ignore publishing objective measurements along with their reviews. If they did, some of them would have a lot of explaining to do with their subjective reviews.

Life magazine of June 15, 1953 had a definition of Golden Ear in the "Glossary of Hifi language" of an article about the US Craze of high fidelity home-systems.

GOLDEN EAR - A person whose hearing is acute enough to differentiate between grades and types of reproductive quality.
TIN EAR - Antithesis of golden ear.

In audiophiles circles the expression is sometimes used to refer to people who can discriminate differences known to be controversial, such as power conditioners, cables and tweaks.

"What you are saying, I think, is that Golden Ears tend to fall into a category audiophile that believes they possess extraordinary ability to discern small differences in sound quality, but are unwilling to provide hard evidence of this talent."

You're right. When I challenged the guy to prove his prowess, he refused, made some excuse about how that would be like challenging someone to prove they could lift a 5 pound barbell, totally unnecessary, blah, blah, blah. That made me so mad, I burned a hole in a cinder block wall with my heat vision.

Slightly off-topic, but along similar lines, this reminds me of the time I was arguing in a politics chat room in the early days of my internet life. We started arguing about something scientific, the guy spouted some mumbo jumbo and when I challenged him, he claimed he was a molecular biologist with a PhD who works in a government lab and was privileged with proprietary information.

Okay, that's just the first part.

A few days later, arguing with the same guy, he made some claim and when challenged, he claimed he was a history professor at Harvard.

So, I remind the guy that I am the same guy with whom he was arguing a few days ago when he was claiming a different profession.

The guy responds, "what -- like I can't do both?"

It's always an interesting question because of the odd opacity of the answer.

I am pretty convinced that a some individuals who frequent audio blogs just either don't hear very well, or don't hear the same things that I hear, or just hear differently.

I find a lot of the repetitive arguments tedious, because nobody knows who can really hear what. Yet it is grossly politically incorrect to actually state that an individual may not actually have the perceptual or processing apparatus to comment, so the blind lead the blind and argue blindly.


There are also the blowhards and patently delusional individuals, or the the con artists who represent the "myth of authority" .

People tend to assume that there is somebody somewhere who knows everything, rather than suffering the insecurity that maybe some people know a lot about some things, but many things are poorly known or understood. That creates a vacuum into which steps the self anointed confidence creep.

I was an audiophile in isolation for a long time, but it has impressed me that a lot of audiophiles are very cultivated, thoughtful individuals. That was after I finally lurked on the blogs and actually met some of my fellow nut jobbers. However, there is an abundance of the other type, the "oppositional defiants" and the loud boors who just want to win an argument at any cost rather than tease out the subtleties for the benefit of everybody.

My solution has been not to argue with the individuals who seem either perception impaired, unskilled, or delusional, or manipulative but listen to the handful of individuals who actually seem to know what they hear and can convey it reasonably well and are generous with sharing their sincere perceptions.

I don't think there is any real way of "testing" a true golden ear, and the self anointed are often not them. I think credibility, sincerity and generosity are more important, because that person will never try to fool you or bully you into his world whatever it might be.

Nicely put.

Very well put.

There are definitely people with great ears, but I find that they mostly hear things that are known to be possible, they are in the upper range of human acuity, not alien from outer space acuity, they can prove it when tested, and I never see them on audio sites taunting others for failing to hear the impossible or even the improbable.

I think, generally, 11 to 14 year old girls test best in hearing acuity.

Few of them have great audio systems, though.

I've got pretty good ears for certain things. It's pretty common that I will be walking around the house saying, "do you guys hear that -- it's bugging me." And everyone else, including my 12 year old daughter, is saying, "what are you talking about?" Then, I'll find a bathroom fan on at the other end of the house or downstairs. Or, the other day, I heard some noise that was bothering me. My wife asked me to describe it, so I imitated it. She pointed to some water that was dripping outside, "could that be it?" We went outside and sure enough, that was it.

On the other hand, she'll ask me to take out the garbage and I can't make out one word she's saying.

Weird.

There's an analogy on the video side.

One time, I was working with some guys on a video and we'd be watching playback when one of the guys -- the golden eye -- would say, "take that back." We'd ask, "what's wrong?" He'd say there was something wrong in one of the frames we'd just watched. At first, there would be disbelief -- it looked fine to everyone else, including other guys with experience working in video. But, we'd rewind and sure enough, in freeze frame, we could see the artifact that was bothering him and it would be fixed.

After awhile, I learned to spot some of them myself, but not as many as he.

There is also a phenomenon in video called Edge Enhancement.

You might see the effect if you turn the sharpness up full on your flat screen or projector.

Sometimes, in the mastering of a video, they "bake" the extra sharpness into the transfer.

If you've seen this, it is a sort of optical illusion. What the sharpening does is insert thin white lines around dark colored objects and/or darker lines along the edges of light colored objects.

Some people call them halos.

If your eyes are "tricked" by the illusion, then you perceive the picture as looking really sharp.

But, the halos are really artifacts -- and if you notice them, they actually make the picture look awful.

Most people don't notice them and are tricked.

On HT sites, you'll see raging debates between people who see the halos and people who say the picture looks awesome.

Attempts are often made to settle the debate by posting still shots with arrows pointing to the halos -- because even in still shots the halos need to be pointed out to a number of people.

People are accused of seeing things that aren't there, etc.

I've read from a number of guys that they can't see the halos, don't want to learn how to spot them, and don't want to look at still shots to verify -- and these guys contribute to a thread where they rate the video quality of blu-rays. They don't want their perception altered, even if it would render them better able to do the job they are attempting.

I guess I can't blame them, though, but it's a perfect example of something......

This being human thing is a mess sometimes.

Last night, we had four of us supposedly "Golden Ears" listen to and compare two DACs. I picked a bunch of music that on another thread were suggested would show up DACs clearly.... decay in soft cymbal strikes, castanets, individual instruments, solo voice, and others that were not included - complex percussive passages, rhythmic jazz, etc.

The two DACs were level-matched to 0.2dB using both pink noise and 1kHz sine, and I always played a track twice on one DAC, switched to the second DAC, played the track twice, and switched back to the first DAC and played the track once.

I say "supposedly Golden Ears" because with the 16/44.1 we preferred DAC X over DAC Y about as many times as I flipped the music around. The DAC that played 2nd was preferred more times than the DAC that was played 1st. But we assigned sonic qualities (faster attacks, more natural decay, etc.) to one DAC and then assigned it to the other.

On 24/192, one DAC was preferred over the other DAC consistently.... until one of the Golden Ears pointed out an inequality between the two DACs. When we fixed that inequality, we marginally preferred it over the other.

However, the difference between the two DACs that all of us picked up on before fixing the inequality was not sonic quality. We thought that the band "hung together" better - like they played better together, and were "in the groove". We all felt more emotionally connected to the music and preferred it much more on one DAC. At 24/192, none of us thought that there was a sonic difference between the two DACs and as a result we connected more with the music.

rsbeck said:

There's an analogy on the video side.

<snip>

I guess I can't blame them, though, but it's a perfect example of something......

This being human thing is a mess sometimes.

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rsbeck - thanks. With video, it's possible to track it down frame by frame, enlarge it, make a still and point out the difference. Unfortunately, with audio, there isn't an equivalent way to do it.

I have the same acuity with CRT TV's - I hear a high pitched squeal with many of them. Walking into a TV store in the old days would give me a headache. But I've been told that the scanning frequency is so high that I cannot hear it. No one has ever managed to convince that headache to go away.

garylkoh said:

(...) On 24/192, one DAC was preferred over the other DAC consistently.... until one of the Golden Ears pointed out an inequality between the two DACs. When we fixed that inequality, we marginally preferred it over the other. (...)

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Can we know what was "that inequality" in order to appreciate the level of the difference you are referring?

microstrip said:

Can we know what was "that inequality" in order to appreciate the level of the difference you are referring?

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It's something that should have not made a difference, and there are many on this forum who will insist on a double-blind test for proof.

And like I said, we did not hear a sonic difference, but was the preference of all four of us. Going back to 44.1kHz, we still couldn't reliably hear the difference between the two DACs, and with the new component, we couldn't reliably hear the difference between the two DACs at 192kHz.

garylkoh said:

rsbeck - thanks. With video, it's possible to track it down frame by frame, enlarge it, make a still and point out the difference. Unfortunately, with audio, there isn't an equivalent way to do it.

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Very true. The other analogy, though, between video and audio is that I think Edge Enhancement in video equates to speakers with a bump in the upper frequencies.

Both can trick a subject into the perception that one is getting more clarity and detail. Some like it, but others will feel the "detail" is "etched" and fatiguing and that it is actually obscuring a more accurate portrait of the sound.

I have the same acuity with CRT TV's - I hear a high pitched squeal with many of them. Walking into a TV store in the old days would give me a headache. But I've been told that the scanning frequency is so high that I cannot hear it. No one has ever managed to convince that headache to go away.

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I have that with lights. I'll be complaining about something irritating me, I'll turn out the lights, the very slight buzzing goes away and I breathe a sigh of relief. The rest of my family is shaking their heads and demanding I turn the lights back on. They hear no buzz, even when I turn the lights off and then on so they can compare. I get, "what are you talking about?!" Of course, in the rooms that matter to me most, I have made sure the electricians wired for no hum or buzz from lights or switches.