What covid research can teach us about audio measurements.

Trying to compare our hearing to any modern scientific measurement tool is folly to the Nth degree. Most audiophiles have no idea what they are listening too. They throw their systems together without measurement so they have no basis for comparison. If you are use to listening to a system that is boosted above 8 kHz a flat system will sound dull even though it is more accurate. If you are under the illusion that your system is flat it might be, but the room is probably not. Obviously everyone is entitled to set up their system any way they want but don't bark at me when I squint.  

Measurement, analysis of the data, developing new technologies to measure and validate original data and analysis?

Thread evaporates in ....3....2....1.....

Anyway the analogy doesn’t make sense to me. They weren’t measuring the MRI machine.

Think of medicine, and that doctors and researchers repeatedly break into two camps.  One camp always looks for more information and more ways of looking at disease. 

Another group gets into a cycle of believing something is true, and that all that can be learned has been learned, until some new technique or tool comes along which forces a change.

Two instances I can think of is polio treatment and gastric ulcers. At some point we thought ulcers were caused by stress. For decades. Only in the late 1980s did a pair of curious pathologists come to discover it’s often caused by bacteria.

Audio measurements, those in the common publications (Stereophile, TAS, Hifi+, etc.) have been more or less stagnant for solid state devices for decades. Of course researchers may be working on more, or use more which we don’t hear about. Audio Precision has an R&D department, but how long has it been since we in the lay readership/press have heard of a new type of measurement which means something to a listener?  Not more precision for old measurements but actually new measurements?

This is why medicine is a good analogy. Let’s not get stuck thinking measurements assembled 50 years ago are all that could be known.