Can You Hear Me Now

@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. 

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....

I forgot to say that claiming to own "golden ears" is ridiculous egotic stance most of the times, but claiming that "golden ears" did not exist is pure simple ignorance ...."Batman"  and  Toscanini are 2 different human beings but they exist anyway ....I am neither one.... And probably you are not either... We must train...

@mahgister
The general consensus is that golden ears do exist but the majority of those who claim to be are not. There is a lot to unfold here. Consider it food for thoughts. 

One year at CES there was a problem with the PA. I was way in back of the packed room but saw the commotion, the running around trying to find the problem. One guy in the middle of the room says something. Everyone pays attention.

Nobody believes me when I tell this story. People with tin ears all want to think they're all there is. Vast majority, tin.

This story proves it. Whole room, at least 100 audiophiles, everyone hearing the same thing and it is just like here, majority nowhere even close. The one guy was right. And I was too far away to see it, all I know is it took a soldering iron. (Last time I told this someone says soldering iron, no way! CES, people. Yes way.) Sound comes back, whatever it was is fixed. Eventually word filters clear back to me, the guy who identified the problem by ear was Stan Ricker.

Now I am no Stan Ricker. But I have been saying if you know how to listen then you can indeed understand what you are hearing even with a strange system in a strange room playing strange music. Stan Ricker picked out one part from among hundreds in a system he had never heard before in a room he'd never been with music he didn't know.

Think what you like people. If you want to side with the folks who can't hear and aren't interested in learning, be my guest. But I will tell you, contrary to popular opinion, this is not a zero sum game. Improve one, improve all. If only they be willing.