Why is science just a starting point and not an end point?

But the way human ears INTERPRET and PERCEIVE the sound experience in a specific room with specific gear is different for each of us...

It is the reason why in the publicity of the marketing of electronical equalizer company recommend it to make any consumers free to use it for different kind of music, different room, different TASTES....

I met a reviewer that claimed he didn't like bass.


Quite often people have preferences for flaws in equipment that isn't neutral. A great example is SETs which have a variety of flaws that interact nicely with human perceptual rules. Tubes exist OTOH because many solid state amps have brightness and harshness due to improper application of loop feedback.


That's different from from saying that we can't measure what's going on. We can. But designers (particularly in high end audio) aren't always coming from an engineering background (or they probably would not be building SETs...) and to further muck things up some designers simply don't have the will (or are constrained by their employers) to make something that is actually neutral to the ear.

Human ears don't interpret and perceive sound the brain does. 

Science has to be applied. That’s what engineers do.

Quite often people have preferences for flaws in equipment that isn’t neutral.

Precisely what is interpreted like a flaw by an engineer can be a positive for a listener... It is because here there is 2 level of experience that ask to be correlated in the best way possible :the design engineering one and the listening experience...But the correlation process is dynamical measurement process between many dimensions and between many parameters in each dimensions, not a static definitive process once and for all under all aspects...

Even neutral is an asymptotic point or direction not a fixed reality....

That’s different from from saying that we can’t measure what’s going on

You explained very well in the case of amplifiers some CORRELATION between harmonics level and perception and the trade-off choices laid in front of the engineer...

But the perceptive experience is related to acoustic and to many other dimensions with all different parameters ....
Audio is a field related to many, many scientific fields and subfields and you know that way better than me...

Then there is scientific rational rules to use but no simple TRUTH reducing human experience to only rules  and replacing all POSSIBLE experiments by only one.... Sometimes a simple experiment speak volume in an imprevisible way....

This is the reason why there is improvement coming from all directions....

Science will alway be the starting point and human experience and freedom the endpoint...

Save for those who put their hope in the replacement of man by machines and the replacement of freedom by laws...But reading you i know that you are not one...

My best to you....

Human ears don’t interpret and perceive sound the brain does.

For sure you are right .... But


When i walk it is ME who walk, not my legs or only my brain...

In the same way I interpret the sound to be music for me because my ears and brain act as one...

In a word "distinguishing" does not mean "separating"....



« If i understand your ears can think and your brain listen ?»-Groucho Marx 🤓

« If there is millions of neurons in the guts we can think of the guts to have a brain of their own, it is the same for any organs even the ears, then we can say that the brain is all over the body, and we can say that the body is INTO the brain»-Anonymus Smith