Then again it may be due to nothing more than garden variety lack of listening skills.
I've written many times before about how when I first went component shopping back around 1991 I could not hear any difference between CD players and transports. One time I brought my Magnavox CDB650 to Definitive and they let me compare side by side with a $5k Wadia. Sounded the same to me. Another time about a week later same store a guy drove up from Portland to audition two CD players and was right there and we listened to both and he said sorry but they sound the same to me!
This went on for months, me struggling to figure out what it is people are hearing. Until one day I come home after having been to Definitive, put on a CD, and its Michael Ruff Poor Boy which is a superb Sheffield tube recording and it suddenly hits me THIS IS IT! Finally I make the connection!
From then on, in seemingly no time at all, it was easier and easier to hear differences between all kinds of things. Not just components and wires and cones but recordings.
Hand in hand with this improvement in listening skills was the ability to be able to say how the sounds are different. Looking back on it, the words actually came first. Reading Robert Harley has a whole section in his book. But its one thing to read about grain, how it can be coarse or fine, all gradations clear and pristine and then on to liquid and then on to syrupy, but its quite another to actually make the connection in your mind to realize what these things really do mean.
So I have said before and will continue to say until contrary evidence comes along that the people who think there's no difference, well they are right. For them there is no difference. Until they learn to differentiate there never will be. Because its not a matter of psychology, or opinion. Its a question of skill. And skills can be learned. If you want to be a good listener, its a skill you can learn. If you want to. But you do have to make the effort.
