Are future improvements in Amp/PreAmps slowing to a crawl?

I said it before on this thread and I very much feel this is where the big improvements will be made:

One area that is a problem for all amplifier designs is that most are designed to have specs that look good on paper and are not really designed to also sound good. Now this is a simple engineering problem (understanding the rules of human hearing and designing to those standards rather than the existing set of arbitrary rules); the bigger problem is tradition- the tradition of how we say what are good measurements and what are not is at the heart of the issue. How do you get the industry to move off of standards set in place 60 years ago??

Until we fix *that* problem, progress will only be had by the outliers who are willing to buck the tradition and pay the price. And they are out there.

IOW its simple engineering, but if we apply our engineering to making equipment that looks good on paper, but at the same time does not acknowledge how the human ear/brain system perceives sound, then we won't make any progress.  We have to overcome the traditions of decades to do that- most of the specs we revere on paper were developed in the 1960s and a lot has been learned about human physiology since then!

ok, now I'm curious - where can I read about the advances in understanding human hearing & perception (psych. not physiol.) thereof since the 1960s?

google
psychoacoustics
nih
ieee
etc

I even listed the signal and measurement requirements for a given measurement and its analysis to be comparable to what human hearing says the signal sounds like.

I did this in some posts, a few years back, in the blowtorch thread over at DIYAudio.

There were enough audio engineers in that thread that someone should have paid attention. I outlined the signal type, it's measurement or measurement weighting... and how this correlated to human hearing.

Not one word said in objection, utter silence. But that might have been a good thing, maybe some of them were listening. Then this equation: Proper question = proper answer.

On of the answers is that you can't get back the signal you pt in, each and very single part and wire that deals with signal is distortion/noise additive or obscuring in nature, an all done slower than the original delta in simplicity an complexity of signal. We are always in a reduced situation.

Which is why false detail swamped in distortions is the norm, which is why some have such trouble in discernment. And spending money in incorrect ways to try and pull out information that is not actually there. All we can do is make a slightly less rich and slightly darker copy of the original signal, nothing more. A chain of components and cables that makes things seem more open is exactly that, 'makes things seem'.

People don't want to hear the truth of the matter, they just want to noise shape their way into perceiving more detail.

Then play the game of shaping that noise and taming it, one cable or component chained with the next. fighting their way through balancing out slow dark fog and hyper etched screech. and the more you chain together the more it comes out as "thumpy screech". The end game of a system package acting as a loudness button slash transient modifier, all chock full of metallic originated noise. It can get very very bad in some systems. So bad I can't stand being in the same room.

Some audiophiles have become so connected to such gear and such intent, that you can't explain to them that they've pooched the idea of real dynamics without noise so badly ... that their $10-20-50-100k systems are a complete waste of time. so unmusical that it is actually painful to hear.

I hate to judge these things too quickly but it certainly appears that human sensory perception, psychoacoustics and how the brain interacts with its surroundings (mind matter interaction) are subjects that tend to make grown men and audiophiles run in the opposite direction as fast as their little feet will carry them. What grown men really want is far from neuroscience or evolution, very far. What they really want is things that make sense. Not things that go bump in the night. Something they can vaguely remember from high school or find quickly on Wikipedia. Something that at least looks like real science, real engineering. Something they can measure. Well, not them, specifically, but somebody. 😬