I Just Know It's BS ... But I Have't Tried It Yet


Have you ever noticed how quickly naysayers jump on "unconventional" products they have never tried, letting us know they are worthless -- shamelessly admitting they have no direct experience with the item they are putting down? For example, anything with the word quantum in the name seems to set some people off. Do you have your favorite examples of this phenomenon? What do you make of this irrational approach to high end audio that is often suffixed by LOL and exclamation points for emphasis?
sabai
Our ears hear and deliver the info but its our minds that do comparisons.

So trusting ears alone for comparisons will not work.

This is a fact and should not be hard to accept.

Not only will it not work, but its not even possible to compare two things with ears only.
We each have no choice but to trust our ears (using the tools we are given) but there is no categorical reason why anyone should trust the "ears" of others necessarily. Ears cannot talk. People do. :^)

OF course trust can be earned over time, but it is not owed.
There are at least a couple of issues here -- trusting your own ears and trusting the ears of others. The only ears you can trust are your own because they are yours. No one's ears can decide better than your own. But if you cannot trust them for one reason or another then this is a moot point.
Our ears - to my mind - are the worst of "test instruments" to judge a given system, but it is the only one we have. It takes a long learning curve to come to trust what you hear.
To get there, you must have developed at least some sense for your inner preferences, your emotional state in a given moment as well of course, just to mention two outer factors, the weather condition and the state your electrical grid is in. Apart from that, to listen as objectively as possible, I feel one should strive for the same state of mind, as FREUD told us as desirable, when listening to his patients: A free floating attention, a state of inner calm, wanting nothing, expecting nothing.
Good listening is as difficult as ZEN. (:
Sorry. I think I was unclear: I meant critical listening, not listening for pleasure. But then if the music lover becomes an audiophile, critical listening always creeps in and often enough spoils all the fun...........