@ghdprentice "High end audio is a very complex endeavor… full of ambiguity and complexity."
Well said. The problem is not "trying to prove a negative," as someone else said, the problem is to hear something that one does not yet know how to hear. Hearing is mostly interpretation and only partly physical. One needs to know what to listen for.
I think of the days before OLED TV’s. People would say, "This IS a black background." Then, much blacker blacks came along and people could now see that they had been missing something. And it was not just the blacks. It was everything on the screen. Everything gets better -- and the whole experience gets better.
So, the first reaction -- "This is just 'up-selling' or 'snake oil' -- turns out to be wrong. What folks came to learn was that quieting visual noise (making backgrounds blacker) changes the foreground by changing the background. That is very hard for people to understand, because they are focused -- almost exclusively -- on what is in the foreground. The fundamental mistake they make is to disconnect foreground and background. They are entangled for both perception and conception. @mahgister makes this point very well when he tries to direct attention to the room's acoustics. But his point applies very well to the technological devices' designs and their power sources, too.
This point about the "blacker background" applies pari passu to other things besides background noise; the way highs, mids, bass registers are expressed by speakers, the way transients and dynamics are shaped. And the technologies that make all these areas better are often not easy to grok, which is why your suggestions of resources like Robert Harley is so appropriate.
@hilde45
I think you have nicely put your finger on a key aspect of the hifi pursuit. As you say we need to learn (train our ears) to find the some imperfections once we get beyond a certain level.
So my observation is that a blacker background on a tv does not make the programming better or worse. However if you focus on the blackness of the background you can make yourself unhappy with your equipment. Is that a smart thing to do? Does this all come down to the old saw about whether we want to listen to the music or the equipment? The brain is very, very good at filtering. It can filter all kinds of distractions if we allow it to. But some are too distracting. For instance I really dislike the surface noise that comes with many LPs, so for me digital sources are preferred. Is there such a thing as 'optimal stopping' in audio? I think so.