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Can You Hear Me Now

In an interview with Laurence Borden of Dagogo, Dr Earl Geddes talked about the ability of people to really have golden ears. In his work at Ford, he tried to gauge how good the ten member golden ear panel was. I will let him tell you his findings. “For the most part the study concluded that this panel was “not capable.” In other words their judgments could not be relied upon to be statistically stable. That said, there were two members of the ten who were capable, so it was possible. But the real point here is that someone is not a good judge of sound quality just because they think that they are – all ten members would have claimed that they were audiophiles and good judges of sound quality.
After several more studies along these same lines, I came to conclude that the more someone claimed to be a “golden ear” the less likely it was that they actually were.”  
That got me thinking: how many of our members would belong to the group of eight and how many would be with the two who could really hear. Interesting reading. The full interview can be found here:
https://www.dagogo.com/an-interview-with-dr-earl-geddes-of-gedlee-llc/
N.B. Dr. Earl Geddes is one of the pioneers of the Distributed Bass Array system. His work on the subject is well known. 
spenav
spenav OP
444 posts
 
@oldhvymec 



I wasn’t asking a question, just pointing out a rather interesting interview that can generate some introspection in some of us. 
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,595 posts
 
Oh well so much for banking on claims of golden ears.  Hopefully the ears are at least clean as a minimum requirement. 
artemus_5's avatar
artemus_5
1,992 posts
 
@ teo_audio

I always enjoy observation of what makes us tick;  cause & effect if you will. So thanks for the post. I wish I could type that fast. I'd have to have started when I woke up this morning to type all that. Self taught with big fingers which get harder to control as I get older doesn't help. My mind still goes at the speed of  sound but my fingers at the speed of a Model A. Anyway, it was a good read

spenav OP
444 posts
 
@russ69 

No one would like to be treated like a Guinea pig, after all we listen to music for enjoyment and not as a profession, at least most of us. I personally want to always be honest with myself. I am old enough to know myself pretty well. I probably would sit somewhere between these two groups. It takes me a while to assess subtlety. Most of the time I would do it by subtraction. I would take out a tweak that has been in my system for awhile and see if that creates a negative difference. If it doesn’t, that contraption got to go. Maybe it will make a difference in someone else’s system. 
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,270 posts
 
The question or the alleged fact here about "golden ears" must be interpreted in training terms and NOT being a way to classify people...

The important fact is our hearing ability is related proportionately to our own ability to train it ourself everyday by listening experiments and musical training...

The FOCUSED hearing or seeing attention is half of our brain work and PERIPHERAL hearing or seing attention the other half...Imagine a rythm between these 2 halves of your brain and this rythm is controlled by your conscious working on it...Like a ping pong player focusing on the ball and at the same times on the body of his opponent...

Remember one of the geatest mystery in acoustic is that anyone COULD SEE with the right training of his ATTENTION the microdynamic playing tonal timbre of an instrument playing this ONE NOTE like a 3-D object in some space with a complete physionomy like a human figure...This is a LEARNED conscious experience for most of us....

And learning how these interrelated visual cues and auditive cues are possibly translated in one another is one of the most striking experience in musical life and in psycho-acoustic science... Acoustic is key to audiophile life and musical training...Not dac, amplifiers,cables,turntable,or even speakers by themselves....

Acoustic is not electronic engineering, nor a TIMBRE is only a spectrum of frequencies...Timbre is a subjective experienced perception, spectrum is a mathemarical hypothesis about Timbre perception which is anyway UNEXPLAINED for the time being...

 A maestro, an acoustician, a piano tuner, a passive audiophile, an experimenting audiophile, an average music consumer, all these are "trained" on a scale that go from almost zero to 100%...

To that we must add innate ability like perfect pitch perception or echolocalization by some blind people...

The true question is NOT whom own "golden ears"...Some few only...

The true question is how do you train your own ears and WHAT do you do for listening experiments and musical training ...

Most people buy a new amplifier and call that an audiophile experience... 😁😊

Some reviewers think seriously that they know much because they had plug 100 costly new amplifiers to a wall and reviewed them ...(mine cost me 100 bucks ) SOUND IS NOT always MUSIC....MUSIC IS NOT always SOUND...An acoustically well informed sound could be good music, but music could be played silently so to speak in the head for example...



And it takes me all my life to learn how to listen to Scriabin and why listening to him for example, and all my life to figure out some acoustic.... Some musicians learn that in the cradle...Some rare blind people know that from the womb...

Golden ears ? we all own some POTENTIAL golden ears, but the NECESSARY training and the INNATE ability scale could vary much....
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