A blessing? Or a curse?

I think you mean people who think they hear better, but never really put that to the test should stop insulting others. All these people who claim they have "superior" hearing, rarely do but they certainly feel the need to tell everyone else they do and that others are inferior. Look how often it happens here.  In all my years, the best "ears" I knew were equipment engineers, support engineers, support technicians and not too far behind recording engineers, some of these people I see regularly made fun of on here. By best I mean people most able to notice when something was off and readily identify what it was.  Good hearing is more than ears, it is about brain power and learning through experience, diverse experience, and many of these people pick up more experience in a year than audiophiles every will in a lifetime. I know several musicians who can hear a tune and play it back fairly accurately. Their brain has been trained, and some would argue wired for notes.  If their instrument is out of tune they will know instantly. Strangely enough, most would be oblivious to frequency response anomalies. Those notes are still fundamentally right. Noisy microphone, not a clue.


Greater visual acuity does not confer greater ability to quickly find detail in a scene, nor to better understand the image being presented. It's not like smells, or even taste, where the sensing is complex, but processing more simple.

When something is not quite right in my audio system, it is not mainly my exact memory of his past sound quality that help me to be conscious of the problem and to correct it...

It is not some replicate model of the past sound keep in my memory, it is a feeling that warn me, like an alarm bell, that something is not quite right.... Then being conscious of the fact that something is not quite right , my alerted awareness can now listen critically and look for the problem....

It is not a conscious memory of the sound that i can recall from my brain, it is the unconscious lack of something that begins to emerge to awareness by the FEELING of my sentient body, because in the past some musical experience was associated with a pleasure that is now lacking, but my body gives me a displeasure or an unsatisfaction that gives to my consciousness the essential hint that something is wrong...

I dont recall or remember the sound in itself, i recall and remember the feeling associated to the musical sound....

It is not necessary to have " bat ears" but only to love music with his heart more than only with his brain....

All my listenings experiments, with which i created my homemade devices controls embeddings were experienced in this way: listening to my internal impression...And these embeddings controls gives me with a low cost systen a high end experience.... :) But without my listening experiments for many years no progress would have been possible at all....I never had the luxury money to buy what most call an high end "upgrade "....But i dont need any upgrade anymore thanks, not to my memory or to the "ears bat" i never had anyway, thanks rather to my heart listenings experiments and experience....

« All music are sounds, but all sounds are not music, the difference is sensed by the feeling organ»- Groucho Marx

« We listen with the heart and the body, not with the ears only»- Harpo Marx impersonating Beethoven

« Learning to hear is not pretending to hear something, it is learning from our emotions, and developing our feelings» -Anonymus

« Only robot can have sensation without feeling»- my wife


P.S. i am neither an engineer nor a musician, only an ordinary someone who dreamed to listen music with a very good sound.....

Final note: to answer the OP, it was not for me a curse because it was not an innate hability, it was a learning ongoing experience that help me create my audio room for peanuts costs, then a blessing.....

I believe our hearing gets better as the night comes on. A combination of tiredness and an increased sensitivity survival mech?

No doubt. One can't erase 200K+ years of evolution since we've only been "civilized" for about the past 12K years when we began agricultural groupings.

I guarantee it that if you're walking in the wilderness alone for awhile and that twig snaps, all of that 200k+ years of conditioning will race to the forefront and surprise you. Heck, on my morning and evening walks I see it all the time as I sometime startle people when I come up on them as I tend to over pronate which quietens ones approach. My SEAL friend said they taught them to walk that way so as to be quieter. 

All the best,
Nonoise

I think you mean people who think they hear better, but never really put that to the test should stop insulting others. All these people who claim they have "superior" hearing, rarely do but they certainly feel the need to tell everyone else they do and that others are inferior. Look how often it happens here.

Jealousy, thy name is audio2design. I’ve never claimed to have "superior" hearing. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that, I’d be able to buy you a hearing aid. Why is it that that old saw is brought up as representative of everyone who’s ever made the claim that they could hear the difference? For a fallback position after all else fails is sad.

And why the appeal to authority with all the engineers and pros who, mostly, are just churning out stuff? Yes, they’re trained to hear better but so does the lowly audiophile that you look down your nose at. It goes both ways. John Atkinson wrote a great article on how sound and recording engineers fall victim to their craft by being limited by it. I can’t find the article but it’s out there for the inquisitive.

Greater visual acuity does not confer greater ability to quickly find detail in a scene, nor to better understand the image being presented. It’s not like smells, or even taste, where the sensing is complex, but processing more simple.

And stop with the strawman arguments. No one stated that and it makes for a poor analogy. Better visual acuity would make it so much easier to train to see better, if that were one’s chosen path, compared to one who had poorer vision. No contest.

As for tasting and smelling we seem to agree that it is complex but where we diverge is that you feel no one hears better if not professionally engaged in it and I feel that hearing acuity varies greatly from person to person due to its complexity, just like any other sense, which you’re dancing around on, avoiding the topic, as one would have to admit that hearing acuity is strengthened through years of hearing.

All the best,
Nonoise

Anytime one has something that is good it is a blessing and people should be thankful for it.