Merely recognizing an instrument is a very low bar. Yours or mine or anyone else’s amalgamation of experiences simply don’t serve as a true reference. Our long term aural memories are reduced to a small fraction of what was originally heard. Human memory is inherently unreliable and extremely limited.
Harry Pearson, the guy who coined the phrase “The Absolute Sound” is a classic example of the unreliability and extreme limitations of long term aural memory as a supposed reference. He would all to often make claims that particular pieces of gear brought new levels of accuracy because they made him feel like the playback was “closer to the absolute sound.” But there was no correlations between the actual accuracy of the gear and his subjective evaluations. And the response to that reality was irresponsible and arrogant. Not only that objective measurements don’t matter but that they were in many cases simply wrong. In any other walk of life this belief would be laughed out the door. The most experienced carpenter in the world can’t visually out perform a basic $10.00 tape measure in evaluating the dimensions of their wood work. The most experienced doctors in the world can’t evaluate a patient’s state of being as well as blood tests, X rays and other objective tests. No painter, no matter how brilliant can match a color from memory even close to as accurately as the Home Depot spectrometer they have in every paint department. I can go on and on. In just about every other facet of the modern world the idea of long term memory as an objective reference is not even a matter of reasonable consideration.
And since the beginings of TAS and the wide spread adoption of HP’s belief system has allowed a major faction of audiophilia to spiral out of control and dive into a world filled with mythologies and just plain bad ideas. A world in which a $100K speaker cable is seen as cutting edge and cutting edge DSP is seen as an impurity that degrades sound quality.
J Gordon Holt summed it up best in his last interview with Stereophile. It was an epic call out of high end audio.
He was spot on
And for evaluating someone's mood or other mental states? What are the measurement tools for that? Functional MRI? Sure, it tells you WHAT the brain is doing when it is processing certain thoughts but it doesn't tell you about that feeling the person is having.
This is the difference between what you are describing in mechanistic terms vs. what is more likely happening when we listen to music. You have all this data you can objectively measure but it doesn't tell you what the listener actually hears. Same as with the functional MRI looking at brain activity.
Now, what you can do with functional MRI is correlate different functions with different moods and feelings and then start to use it as a predictive tool for certain behaviors.
Same thing with audio, you can take your measurements and play things for people and gauge their response to it and start to make correlations between what they like and the measurements of the gear that they said they like. However, without this connection, your measurements are not really useful except for quality control...that you can make something that measures the same repeatably.
BTW., it is the same in the pharmaceutical industry. We develop drugs with a given purity and potency. However, what that drug does cannot be determined by measurements alone (such as dissolution testing for tablets). It has to be correlated to clinical results where it is administered to patients. However, it is not even enough to get their blood plasma concentrations. This tells you that yes, the drug dissolved as it was supposed to and yes, it is now circulating in the bloodstream the way you expected, but it STILL doesn't tell you about the efficacy for the given indication. What you then try to do is correlate with technical data so that you gain a bit of predictive power.
Your post reminds me that I am dealing with someone who doesn't really understand what the role of measurements are in many cases. For some, like an X-ray seeing a broken bone, or a distortion measurement showing an amp isn't grounded properly, it is obvious. When it is the interface of technology and human perception or physiology then the use of technical data is different and less direct. Audio is like that. A flat speaker measurement doesn't tell you how a speaker will sound...it simply tells you that it won't have any strange aberrations in frequency response...it can still sound like crap for a myriad of other reasons.
