Don’t want to freak you out…

Put headphones on behind the ear. You will be amazed. I have hearing lose and wear hearing aids but fortunately for me, my roommate in college is one of the best ear doctors in the country. The hearing aids are state of the art and highly customizable so music is still with me.

On occasion when I don't feel like wearing the aids I put the headphones on behind my ears and the results are fantastic. Also have hands free for cocktails.

@nonoise Now that's a very effective "audio tweak". Perhaps the best one!

@jimmy2615 

This is the point I was hoping to get to here. If I have to do it because of dinky ears plastered to the side of my head, anyone who wants to take the entire "system" into account, or that is just a bit scientifically curious, should try changing the orientation of their pinnas, cup their hands behind the ears etc.

I can say, after a bit of playing around with throw pillows this morning, that if I wasn’t going to remodel our family room so that I can rotate my system, the best solution for me, without spending a fortune on room mods, would be a high wingback listening chair that suppresses rear reflections.

I realized when I got back into sound systems that I never got the maximum out of my older systems because of this, and used an equalizer to bump up the highs.

But the fact behind this little musing is that since no two ears are the same, meaning  that no two listeners are the same, no one is hearing a particular system the same. So all the equipment talk and preferences are based on opinion biased by the listeners body.

Do we all hear about the same? Yep, but we hear differently enough so that we all should realize that, given a "perfect" stereo source, all of us would notice slight differences in the sound of the system. How a system sounds to that group would look like a bell curve of variations in sound, and the middle 60% or so would pretty much agree on certain characteristics.

But for me, I'll now consider that someone may not hear something I do or do not in system sound.

And of course, if you have "normal" ears and enough money that spending a tidy sum on your system and room modifications, this is fairly irrelevant to you, unless your just curious, and want to have the ability to cut others some slack from time to time.