then why continue to use the term when there is no "correct" method for subjectively evaluating a headphone beyond putting it on your head and turning the sound on? it doesn't apply and that's my point. sure there are more optimal ways of evaluating headphones such as in a quiet listening room rather than at a noisy meet for instance, and improving our listening skills and how we convey what we are hearing in writing are laudable goals, but that won't make one person's subjective listening impressions any more "correct" than another's.
Do you by chance make a living on riding on words? The original statement was this: "The competition takes care of your price concerns, we should just be able to correctly evaluate them. So let's focus on the sound quality on this forum. Also, cultivate your listening skills, so that opinions here are more trustable and consistent than yesterday."
Then you go and pick one word, throw away the whole idea for your perception of incorrect wording, then repeat the same point nevertheless.
It would have been more constructive to say "replace 'correct' with 'better' or something like that", but you have to prove smarter.
While in absolute terms 'correct' is impossible to define, the term 'more correct than' is much easier to define. So yes, I sustain there are more correct ways to evaluate a headphone than just putting it on your head and turning on the sound. As said before, including context (ancillary equipment, musical genre, recording, etc), aimed to minimized source variance, and improving our listening skills to notice more things that are heard but not necessarily paid attention to automatically.
i'm also sceptical of your claim that "there are much more examples when trained ears agree than when they don't". i'd like to see some hard evidence to support that because audiophile publications and forums suggest otherwise from what i've observed.
well given what we've been witnessing in the high-end segment of the headphone market, i think the kind of disruption that you're hoping for is looking rather forlorn.
There are many scientific publications dealing with or having sections on correlating measurements with subjective listening. The point that it's possible to improve evaluations by learning doesn't need much defense either. For a narrow example, speech synthesis and audio processing algorithms for speech intelligibility have been using these findings for long time.
Anyway I didn't intend to quote hard evidence on it. My subjective observations on these forums are kind of opposite of yours in the sense that based on what I read, people do seem to hear things in similar way, and when they disagree, to me it seems to be more attributed to different context (music, equipment) and yes, preferences than their auditory perception and cortex. When you put people in the same listening position with the same music, they tend to provide similar evaluations, provided they pass a minimum level of training (which most people who play instruments or go to concerts and have gotten through a few headphones already have).
Yes there are variances even in one person's evaluations, and there are examples when trained ears do disagree - but we better check is it sure did they disagreed in the same context? And if the context is different, is it possible that (figuratively speaking) the information is lost in noise?
My original point was that noise level on these forums is high, and we could learn to do better on it, to provide more correct evaluations in average, whether you like or not the word 'correct'.
That is the basis why I believe people should strive to give more context to evaluations, and learn to do them better. If I believed this was not possible, and if I believed the only thing needed was just to put on a headphone and turn music on, I wouldn't have bothered reading or writing anything on this forum, other than for amusing myself to death
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I am fine if you disagree with this, my opinion is not absolute, but your opinion is not absolute either.
