Did you approach the research with an attitude of intellectual honesty and the humility necessary to learn from people who know things you don't know?
To be fair, I think most audiophiles do exactly that. The problem is, that the “
people who know things you don’t” are the companies/marketers trying to scam audiophiles, reviewers reliant on advertising revenue from those companies and other audiophiles steeped in all that marketing BS. From an audiophile’s point of view, aren’t you going to turn to those who must know because they actually make/design audiophile products, say Rob Watts, Paul McGowan or Sony, those with long respected careers reviewing audiophile products, like John Atkinson or John Darko, or are you going to turn to some anonymous guys in a dark corner of Head-fi? If you don’t already have a pretty decent understanding of audio, intellectual honesty and critical thinking would clearly indicate the former over the latter.
This comes from a basic misunderstanding of how digital audio works, and there's no excuse for being ignorant about that.
To be fair again, there is a very good excuse for being ignorant about how digital audio works. With barely more than a couple of exceptions, pretty much all the audiophile manufacturers and reviewers routinely misrepresent how digital audio works and have done for decades.
I do find there are a lot of aspects of sounds that are not yet quantified or well understood.
That goes back to what I said above, what is it that you “do find”? Within the audiophile community, what you do find is largely marketing BS or opinions/observations based on it. Even if you’re very skeptical, it’s near impossible not to be influenced by it to some degree. One of the oldest, most common and most effective audiophile marketing tactics is to deliberately confuse audio properties/performance with the subjective perceptions/preferences/opinions of those who listen to them. Your assertion above is a good example of this. The actual fact is that there are no “
aspects of sounds that are not yet quantified or well understood” and this was proven over 70 years ago. However, there are quite a lot of aspects of how individuals perceive sounds that are not yet quantified or fully understood.
I think science always has a generational problem, where new knowledge only really takes hold when the old guard dies off.
This again has its roots in audiophile marketing. What you assert is true in some branches of science, where we might partly have to rely on “working hypotheses” because the reliable evidence does not yet exist, theoretical physics, medicine and psychoacoustics for example. This isn’t the case with audio science though, we’re not dealing with assumptions or “working hypotheses”, we’re dealing with well established laws of physics and proven/demonstrated scientific theories/theorems. Arguably, there has been no new scientific knowledge in this field since the late 1980’s but even that dealt with edge cases on or below the threshold of human hearing and it “took hold” in the early 1990s. There has of course be advances in technology (the application of the science) since then and in the field of psychoacoustics.
If audiophile claims turn out to be true, it will probably take a few decades at least to override the previous consensus.
Again, unlike medicine, psychoacoustics and some other branches of science, audio science is not based on consensus, it’s based on proven/demonstrated laws and theorems. So, for audiophile claims to be true, you’d have to “override” say Ohms law or the Nyquist/Shannon Theorem but how’s that possible? If Ohms law were wrong, none of our power grids or electrical devices would work, if the Nyquist/Shannon theorem were wrong, none of our digital devices would work. Of course it depends on exactly which audiophile claims we’re talking about but a surprisingly high number fall into this category of “just not possible”.
D Trump is an idiot though. He should be on the top left. Einstein and Hawking on the right
Exactly, I was following your example of putting it backwards! With all fairness, Rob Watts probably isn’t a moron but it’s a bit difficult to tell because he makes quite a lot of moronic assertions. It’s very possible he does know what he’s talking about but makes moronic assertions for marketing purposes because his target demographic will swallow it.
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