The preferences of untrained listeners are very different from our preferences. Although I disagree on most views of Floyd Toole concerning the high-end I second his basic position concerning "natural" stereo sound reproduction. Without training stereo is extremely limited - it doesn't even create a soundfield, we must imagine it from micro-cues and our musical experience. It is why there is so much disagreement in the high-end.
I’d suggest from the very moment we start perceiving we are trained listeners Francisco.
We are surrounded by a range of diverse natural sounds from the moment of our very first listening. We are shaped by the first voices and the tone in those voices. We are trained by the harmonics of both our human interaction of our culture and by our perceptions in our environment.
We appreciate certain qualities, relate the experience of soft to loud, harmonic structure and all the interrelated feelings that these things bring. The security created by the non-threatening sounds and the chaos caused by clashing fields of an urban sensory overload.
The sound of your environment trains you and the sound of typical environments has changed markedly. Contemporary life is overfilled with the chaos of diverse and competing sounds.
So the soundfield we may seek more so now may be simpler and more whole as a balance to the over sensation of our daily worlds. The rightness of a sound will relate to the needs of the time and our place in the cycle of our development. We awake from no sound to simple sounds, we open to more and more sounds, we seek new influences, new sounds, more complexity, then we take ourselves to the edge and realise the return to simplicity is then a natural conclusion as we turn to return to home.
We start with nothing, we atomise it to infinity, we seek to find the one thing and then it becomes as nothing. Night opens to dawn, then opens and becomes the full light of day then turns back towards the fading resolution of the sunset and into the void and simple empty silence of the night.
So then some points leads us to perceive the whole, and some then lead us to hear the parts. That for me is where the difference really lies. Some systems lead us to hear all the parts and some systems lead us more to hear the whole. So we are trained by our perceptions and that includes the nature of our systems yes.
You are trained by the nature of your Soundlabs and your Wilsons as well as the gear that drives them.
I have trained myself over the last few years through the simple lens of 2 way OB horns... moving away from the separating of sounds back towards the healing back into one and through that point of one and the other the inevitable merge back into no separation.
Training for me is a cycle, we start whole and simple, we separate and fragment and move more towards the parts, then when we have heard as much from the parts as we can we move back and merge into hearing the whole again. This for me is the different perceptual stances between sounds and music, so the parts and the whole. Complexity tends to lead us to the parts, simplicity to the whole. So our training is ceaseless but cyclical.
My timing I believe is good, as I approach the sunset I’m letting go of the realisation of the separation in things and merging back into the whole. My speakers are training me towards the music and away from the sonic field. We perhaps associate natural with our earliest experiences and seek to return to the related music of an undifferentiated wholeness.