I love a good audio placebo effect - especially if it's cheap. I know I'm susceptible to my audio perception being amazingly transformed simply by being told something about the sound source or given a suggestion of what I should be hearing. Ever hear those evil rock 'n roll records played backwards before someone tells you what the devil's words are supposed to be? I never can make out a single word until I'm told what the words are supposed to be, and then I hear them suddenly very clearly, and can't unhear them. Also, what I'm looking at makes a big difference for me. If I can see that I'm in a wide open space I hear more spaciousness, even when I'm wearing headphones. Walking at night with headphones can be amazing.
Audio is lacking in information, forcing our brains to make up what's not actually detected by inference from other senses. Just like the spinning ballerina silhouette illusion - I can't determine which way she is spinning with the information given, but my mind makes a decision in ways I know not and it's very difficult at that point for me to envision her spinning the other way. People talk about depth and layering in audio. With our visual system we actually have depth detection from both triangulation and shifts with small head motions, as well as comparing relative sizes of know objects at a distance. With sound it's not nearly as precise, and what one person perceives from a pair of speakers as depth and layering another person with perfectly good hearing may perceive as something less good. There's a lot of corrective imagining going on to create the effect of audible depth because what is actually reaching your ears is significantly different than what a real signal at the perceived distance would be. I used to say you have to mentally cross your ears correctly to hear the effect, like those picture books with the repeating patterns. If you get your eyes set correctly you'll "see" the 3D shape. If you do it wrong everything will be perceived as inverted, quite awkward and unnatural, but you'll still see the shape of the teapot or whatever. I know the same can happen for me with audio, and a depth effect can be created with some equalization effects. This sounds very bad though if my brain refuses to decode it as depth. Instead I just get strange tone from a sound source that I'm perceiving as being closer to me.
Audio is lacking in information, forcing our brains to make up what's not actually detected by inference from other senses. Just like the spinning ballerina silhouette illusion - I can't determine which way she is spinning with the information given, but my mind makes a decision in ways I know not and it's very difficult at that point for me to envision her spinning the other way. People talk about depth and layering in audio. With our visual system we actually have depth detection from both triangulation and shifts with small head motions, as well as comparing relative sizes of know objects at a distance. With sound it's not nearly as precise, and what one person perceives from a pair of speakers as depth and layering another person with perfectly good hearing may perceive as something less good. There's a lot of corrective imagining going on to create the effect of audible depth because what is actually reaching your ears is significantly different than what a real signal at the perceived distance would be. I used to say you have to mentally cross your ears correctly to hear the effect, like those picture books with the repeating patterns. If you get your eyes set correctly you'll "see" the 3D shape. If you do it wrong everything will be perceived as inverted, quite awkward and unnatural, but you'll still see the shape of the teapot or whatever. I know the same can happen for me with audio, and a depth effect can be created with some equalization effects. This sounds very bad though if my brain refuses to decode it as depth. Instead I just get strange tone from a sound source that I'm perceiving as being closer to me.