Cheers, I get it. Just one thing about the clouds though - it’s subtly different I think, than the way you described it. You went from clouds to thinking the sun rotated around the earth. My cloud analogy isn’t akin to that, it’s akin to noticing the sun is there and wondering what it’s all about. Notice the clouds, wonder what they’re about. Not notice the clouds and make assumptions about them. So with an aural phenomenon I’m only saying it’s been noticed - no assumptions about its nature, origins or reality. I think the language and meaning of what each of us is saying is important if we’re to understand each other.
Thanks for the post, super clear.
You're right, I went for something else(the problem of the wandering mind ^_^).
I get your point, and of course there are very many audio cues that just about anybody notices, with nobody asking to prove that it was real. It's typically a matter of magnitude and common knowledge about hearing abilities and the type of difference a certain situation tends to create. Such example could be the sound from a crying baby one row from us on a plane. The same trip with and without the crying baby, that's something you probably won't have to ABX when telling others that it was audibly different. ^_^
But that's because babies can be loud, they "attack" a frequency range we're quite sensitive to, and the SPL output is so much above audibility that we still get annoyed while hearing the turbines of the plane. + Most people know exactly how it feels.
We could also consider saying that headphone X and headphone Y sound audibly different. I don't imagine people challenging you on such a claim because it's usual for headphones to have audible levels of sound difference(it's rare not to have completely different distortion profiles and a few dB here and there being louder on one phone).
But already we are in trouble because it's extremely hard to put on a headphone and not feel the difference in pads, weight, clamping force, amount of isolation, or just the look while picking them up. So if and when 2 headphones turn out to sound the same, it's likely that people would still find "sound" differences.
When Harman tried to test different headphones for preference, people would recognize the Audeze(heavier than Thor's hammer) in the group. When trying to only test for sound preference, that's a serious problem if people recognize the super popular LCD at the time. They ended up using the same headphone and simulate, with convolution, the sound of several headphones. Which is bad in various ways and displeased many people reading the paper, but that shows you how far they decide to go to try and remove non audio variables in a listening test.
Harman is also the company that built an entire system so that they could move speakers rapidly and quietly while doing blind tests behind a curtain. Because, even with the curtains and even with people not being told which speaker was used in the trial, just the position of the speakers was impacting the results.
It's quite hard for someone with a little knowledge on human senses, psychology, or just listening tests in general and their results, to just take the global human experience of listening, as something specific to sound. I get that it makes us look paranoid and perhaps even crazy sometimes, but the distinction between subjective and objective reality exists for good reason.
