What are we objectivists missing?

Being an Audiophile is primarily about 2 things, your equipment and how it sounds. Each person is unique, what you hear is determined by your ears and your brain, what you enjoy is determined by your preferences and experience. I have frequently sat in a colleagues room or store demonstration room and listened whilst someone told me how great it sounded, but to me it sounded awful.  Long experience trying to like Klipsch or Cyrus electronics comes to mind (separate story told here more than once). I cannot say Klipsch speakers sound terrible, but I can say they do to me. You can measure them until the cows come home, they will still sound terrible to me. This pastime is all about finding an illusion,( the Beatles or Bach are not playing music in your lounge room tonight), that you like. Someone telling you that  a different illusion sounds better or measures better is completely pointless. Trying to be completely objective about something that is essentially subjective is not scientific.

@jtucker

"We don’t know what we don’t know"

Exactly. Our hearing acuity is much more complex than current science can define.

Not just cables but components as well. Great measurements can only get you so far, then the rest is an art of trying different things to improve the sonics. If we can measure what good sonics sound like, we’d have fatter bank accounts.

+1 @henry53  for:

"Trying to be completely objective about something that is essentially subjective is not scientific."

"What are we objectivists missing?"

Plenty, including some of the most important parts.

"I figure subjectivists are like religious people and objectivists are the scientists. There is no proof that a new cable, silver fuse, etc improves the sound, but they believe it does As @djones51 said, until you take vision out of any audio testing, there's going to be bias."

mrskeptic, you are assuming objectivists are scientists.  Bad assumption.  Both are subjectivists.  What is subjective about science?  Too much blind faith in current knowledge.  In audio, that is that the equations are good enough to measure everything, and if it can be measured by current knowledge, then it cannot exist.

Real world, unrelated example that I've brought up before.  Kepler's laws of planetary motion could predict the motion of all the planets--except Mercury.  Why?  The mass of the Sun is so great in comparison to mercury that you need to make relativistic corrections (ie Einstein's general relativity theory) to get accurate predictions for mercury.  Newton's theories work fine for the other planets, and Kepler used Newton's work to predict planetary motion of most planets.

The point?  Blind faith in science is a form of religion.  If Newton's equations (via Kepler in this case) can be limited to specific parameters, then show me the person smarter than Newton that has all the answers.

If anyone thinks that science is some objective monolith without emotional decision making, then they are showing the same blind faith that people today think is reserved for religion.

You can hear things that the physics of sound does not model.  And with current knowledge, cannot model.