How do different people hear differently.

I think different people pick out and focus on different frequencies than other people. I also believe the reason it sounded really different from person to person is they probably had to ask the individual questions afterwards, playing the song again, playing certain parts of the song, getting feedback on which frequencies, maybe the tester would be fiddling with an EQ asking "more of this, or less?" etc. Then in the end they went on what all three participants said and EQ'd the song that way and played it back.

Just my guess.

One way I have noticed that people hear so differently is by using binaural recordings. Some people get the 3D placement 100% correct. Others have difficulty locating vertical sounds and others have difficulty accurately placing horizontal sounds. Still, others have difficulty differentiating sound coming from the front from a sound coming from the rear. My guess is that our brains have learned to localize sounds using our own individual pinnae. If your ears are closer to the average, then you will hear the binaural recordings more accurate than if your ears are more unique.

I do agree this is why the opinions on headphones are so varied. I hardly know the intricacies of headphone design (like the HRTF and such, I only have a vague understanding) but to my ears every headphone I have tried to this day (including such loved headphones as HD-600, DT-880, and the LCD-2) are incredibly peaky and awful sounding. None of them even come close to "real" in terms of sound reproduction. Yet read reviews anywhere and people use descriptions like tonal accuracy and realistic to describe some of them. So perhaps my ears are just very different than what most headphones are designed for. I'm not sure. I have a Beyer T1 on the way and I'm really curious to see if the angled drivers make a difference (because speakers sound fine to me)

What he said. Hearing is like learning how to talk. If you grow up in one area, in one environment, the way you speak is very different from someone from another area, whether it be language or just dialect. Auditory is the same way, people learn to listen differently. A person brought up on classical will have different auditory perception than a person brought up on rap (very extreme example, but it serves the purpose) Classical is very balanced and a person that listens to it will appreciate instrument separation and resolution as well as sound stage far differently as the person brought up on rap. Likely the person brought up on rap will find lack of resolution not as bad as someone who was brought up on classical. 

As uncle erik also stated, musical training has a lot to do with it as well. People who take music theory or were part of a band learn to listen for musical cues, and thus tend to scan the music mentally. 
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Uncle Erik 

Life experiences also change how you interpret music. I spent years playing in bands and orchestras. My brain starts scanning the orchestra for proper pitch, intonation and the same cues I listened for while trying to blend with the group while playing.

Likely why certain "plasticky" sounding headphones drove me crazy.

they call me the dog whisperer. i can speak to dogs.

Interesting, i would be interested in reading that article. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by cifani090 

Interesting, i would be interested in reading that article. 

Not that exact article but.

http://www.cns.nyu.edu/events/earclub/artfiles/Wightman_Kistler1998.pdf

Also.

I'm sure we all hear the roughly same, perhaps minus some hearing damage. "We all hear differently" just seems like an excuse for people to push BS on this site. 

Quantitatively you are correct, other than hearing loss everyone's hearing is the same. However, people can be taught or learn from experience how to listen for different things. In that sense we can hear differently.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Satellite_6 

I'm sure we all hear the roughly same, perhaps minus some hearing damage. "We all hear differently" just seems like an excuse for people to push BS on this site. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by kyuuketsuki 

Quantitatively you are correct, other than hearing loss everyone's hearing is the same. However, people can be taught or learn from experience how to listen for different things. In that sense we can hear differently.
 

 

I don't think that this is true. 
*eta- I can be convinced. Can you show where the quantitative measurements are.

It's like how we perceive time differently (time flies when you're having fun or time crawls when you're bored). In spite of that, we can all sync our watches and meet somewhere at the same time. It's like reality passes through a contextual filter in our minds.

So you don't agree that humans hear in the range of 20Hz to 20kHz? Because normal hearing is defined as the ability to hear that range of frequencies. The perception of individual frequencies or frequency ranges is a different story.

This is not including sounds perceived by feeling vibrations. Which can increase the amount people can hear in both directions, but that is dependent on tactile sensitivity. This is also not including natural hearing loss.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by JadeEast 

I don't think that this is true. 
*eta- I can be convinced. Can you show where the quantitative measurements are.