Stehno, I think Amir is someone who has that facility of hearing these distortions based on his descriptions of the blind testing he has done & his MS training in distortion identification. I think most people with sufficient training & motivation will reach a fairly decent level in this faculty but most aren't really bothered. But there is one great flaw in this training - we only can concentrate on one or two aspects of the sound at any moment in time & in a moving target such as music, it's easy to miss some flaw because were focussed elsewhere.
I posted
this link a while ago - it's the audio equivalent of the change blindness video where the gorilla walks across the video shot & a lot of people don't notice him because they are focussed on another visual task.
Here's the link to the explanation of this selective attention issue
Some further reading can be done here
I appreciate your note, jkeny, as well as your respect for Amir’s alleged hearing abilities. And I don’t mean any disrespect to you or Amir in my response here.
But in my experience, all the tests in the world mean very little when it comes to critically listening to a playback system and sufficiently and accurately evaluating what one heard. And it’s not what you think about somebody but what you know about somebody.
Here's just a few questions that come to mind since you've endorsed Amir's hearing skills:
- Have you ever met Amir in person?
- Have you ever sat with Amir while he was critically listening to a relatively well-thought-out system or any system for that matter?
- Was that time together more than 5 or 10 minutes?
- How passionate is Amir about live music?
- What genre’s and venues does he frequent?
- What are his thoughts of the live music performance afterward?
- What does Amir’s playback system sound like to you?
- What are Amir’s reactions when listening to a torturous opera passage or the sharp strikes of a piano’s upper registers, or complex and/or dynamic passages?
- Does Amir listen to playback music at elevator volume levels or at 120db?
- What are Amir’s thoughts on a playback system’s limitations in light of live music?
- How is Amir able to discern the many distortions that are inaudible but still wreak havoc on a playback presentation?
I don't expect you to answer these questions here but I hope you would have asked yourself some of these questions before providing an internet endorsement. I’m just rattling off a handful of questions here and if given some thought, I could probably come up with maybe 30 better constructed and pointed questions.
Moreover, since we're talking about your endorsement of Amir's hearing abilities and since I don't know you, what value is your endorsement of Amir to me? If I'm attempting to perform due diligence and if you want me to accept your endorsement of Amir's skills, should I not be asking similar questions of you in order to better qualify your endorsement of Amir?
To the best of my knowledge I probably only know a couple of members of this forum. What if on a scale of 1 - 10 every member of this forum rated Amir's hearing ability a 9 or 10, should I trust Amir's hearing skills because a bunch of strangers highly rated his skills? Where's my reference point?
For those in this thread advocating "audio science" whatever that means, where does any type of science come into play when somebody I don't know endorses another's hearing skills over the internet whom he may or may not have met in person?
As you may know, an audiophile’s (and reviewer’s) ability to sufficiently discern what they hear is all over the map. Moreover, the internet can make absolutely anybody look like an expert about anything at least for a time. Some may express great faith in others based on words alone. But this is an audio-only industry and in my experience, the only way I could be convinced of accurately assessing somebody’s hearing abilities and whether or not my assessments were realistic is if I met and spent time with them in front of a playback system. IOW, I’m pretty convinced there is no substitution for this firsthand experience of another’s abilities.
Again, without intending to be disrespectful, I’ve observed a number of Amir’s responses and his responses do not impress me as one necessarily possessing well-trained ears. Of course I could be wrong big time. And although it's been said more than once that Amir possesses keen hearing, that alone has almost zero to do with having well-trained ears. But then again, it matters not what I think about somebody’s talents or what somebody claims whom I’ve never met in person. After all, this is the internet. What matters is what I know to be true from firsthand experience. What matters is, do they truly possess well-trained ears? And how am I to verify that if I’ve not spent time with them in front of a given playback system? If for no other reason than as a reference to my own hearing.
IOW, it seems pert near impossible to accurately assess anybody’s hearing skills over the internet as there are way too many assumptions that need to be made to reach such a conclusion. Even if one spent 10 years dialoguing about audio daily over the internet yet never experienced a single listening session together, in the end it’s still only a guess.
Some people are optimistic and think everybody has fabulous hearing and fabulous sounding playback systems without ever knowing the person or ever hearing their system. I’m not that type. And when it comes to high-end audio being all over the map over most every subject, as demonstrated in this very thread, I think such optimism does more harm than good. Simply because it gives credence where it doesn’t necessarily belong. I’m not saying you’re guilty of this potential as I’ve no clue what your relationship with Amir is. But I don't know Amir and I don't know you. Hence, your endorsement of Amir provides me no value.
I'm not sure why, but I almost feel like I should be insulted if you thought your internet endorsement would have any affect on me one way or another.
