Creating a Audio Dartboard

[The Smokester]

...2. Another update: Science has figured out why Strads sound the way they do according to this article.
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Sorry, but this article hardly constitutes proof. It merely presents measurements and then speculates that the correlated differences are responsible for the difference in sound. It couches its suppositions tentatively rather than conclusively.

 

[tonmeister2008]

OK so I propose that no one over the age of 20 should be involved in designing speakers or listening to high end audio gear. That solves that problem.

Pardon me. Vision is the dominant sense is news? Think you've discovered something new? Try standing on one leg, then closing your eyes and standing on one leg. Bet you'll fall over! Ruskies showed us this half century or more ago.

You don't have to possess perfect hearing to design loudspeakers or enjoy music. I didn't say that, you did.

One of our best speaker engineers is in his 60's and is approaching retirement. He can get his loudspeakers to sound great because he is a very talented, experienced engineer and he has access to probably the industry's best loudspeaker testing facilities in the world. He can get his designs 90% optimized based on objective measurements alone. The final 10% is done based on listening, which he does along with carefully selected and trained listeners who do have normal hearing. Why would Harman spend a million dollars on an anechoic chamber equipped with sensitive calibrated B&K laboratory microphones, another few million dollars on dedicated listening rooms with speaker movers- and then completely ignore the final measurement device - the human ear - and not check to see if it is properly working and calibrated?

Floyd Toole in his book "Sound Reproduction" argues that consumers put too much faith in audio reviewer's opinions when we have no knowledge of their qualifications in terms of hearing and critical listening abilities, two qualifications that can be measured and quantified in terms of performance.

When I said vision is a more dominant sense I was referring to it relative to hearing. What you describe is our equilibrioception sense which is considered a separate sense from hearing. Are you arguing that vision is not the dominant sense? From what I've read eighty to eighty five percent of our perception, learning, cognition and activities are mediated through vision.

So, no, it's not news that vision is the dominant sense, but in your original post you said you didn't understand why people trust their vision but not their ears. There are good reasons why that is the case, which hopefully I explained.