What are we objectivists missing?

I'll give you guys a mystery of my own.  I got into upgrading speakers for a little while and the results were fun and educational.

I used a DATS V2 to measure replacement parts.  I believe Focals use Solen as their OEM and IMHO it shows.  I really prefer the sound of the almost as inexpensive Mundorf MKPs instead.  Anyway, I replaced the tweeter caps after measuring the original and new caps for capacitance and equivalent series resistance (ESR).  Both were very very similar.

For about 4 days after replacement I kept hearing weird surround sound effects.  I would hear sounds from the recording appear to happen below and behind me.  Later on this cleared up and never happened again.  The resulting sound was less harsh and more mellow than the original caps.

The weird sound effects I have always chalked up to head related transfer function (HRTF) effects.  The idea that the right comb filtering can make us hear things happen in 3D space.

HRTF effects are complicated.  If I wanted to measure or prove/disprove this was happening I'd need to have recorded the sound and compared the frequency response and phase responses of the before and after.  If that measured the same I'd chalk it up to my hearing, but to this day I think HRTF would explain what I heard and capacitor break-in behavior a lot more than uF and ESR.

@sns 

“What “what are objectivists missing? Trust in their senses, which may be good thing in that certain individuals have a less developed aural acuity.”

So the problem here for those trained in science is that we have learned early on that our senses cannot perceive things that are there and conversely can also perceive things that are not there. Measurement and replication are the only tools we have in the struggle with self deception.

@sns 

“Audio subjectivists are the furthest thing from being religious, we disagree on so much. While we may believe in our systems and/or choice of equipment, we allow other's those same prerrogatives. If this religion, sure is one incoherent belief system.“

Have you checked lately how many religions there are on earth? And that is just one planet :-)

Most objectivists miss Ayn Rand.

I don't know if someone has touched on it in this thread, but when considering the manufacturers goal is to sell product, they come up with supposedly innovative designs for their cables with exotic processes that (according to them) make profound (positive) differences! The question from a scientific perspective is if you can't measure the differences, then how do you formulate your hypothesis to even begin to design a cable?! Without a sound scientific methodology, where would you even begin to innovate? Regardless of whether there is actually a sonic difference, without a point to begin from, they are only guessing at what will or won't work, and how could anyone trust that?!!!