Totally Ridiculous....Auditions on YouTube!

@mirolab 

If I were to then ask, "which color is better?", there's NO way you could assess that, because the photo is tainted by the light in the room, the camera used, and finally the monitor you are looking at.

That's a good point. Things can get very murky without a consistent sonic point of reference.

This has been previously referred to by the likes of Toole and Olive who talk of audios circle of confusion.

Their hope is that that the use of more consistent, better measured loudspeakers in recording studios will go a long way towards eliminating this circle of confusion.

Otherwise, vintage recordings made and mastered on vastly different monitors are likely to sound substantially different when played back on loudspeakers built today.

Thankfully when it comes to colour reproduction we already have a reference. International colour charts such as the British Standards Colour chart linked below.

I became aware of such charts after reading that Morrissey used such a chart to instruct his record company on the exact shade of green he wanted for the Smiths brilliant 'The Queen is Dead' album.

Having such a familiar reference always helps us poor humans whenever we are comparing things as we ourselves seem to be rather more inconsistent than most electronic equipment.

I would agree that you could say Speakers A are slightly brighter than Speakers B.   But SO WHAT!!  

That alone could be an enormous help to someone drawing up a shortlist for audition purposes.

https://seanolive.blogspot.com/2009/10/audios-circle-of-confusion.html?m=1

https://britishstandardcolour.com/

It is all noise, nothing but.

Noise in the data.

Noise in the source (YouTube)

Noise in your computer.

just like with pictures and colors on your monitor. Do you decide on a paint color for your home from your laptop? Nope you go get paint samples and roll it out.

Yep it’s all just noise.

Its not ideal but I think its useful to see if you can hear relative differences between two components in the same video. It’s not going to give you an absolute impression of how each component sounds but rather a relative comparison between the two.

Someone above posted an example of taking a photo of two colors with a cellphone and then sending them to someone and asking them which one is better.  I would say thats not the correct analogy.  The proper analogy would be to take a picture with your cellphone of two different colors of white... lets take Benjamin Moore "White Dove" and then Benjamin Moore "Chantilly Lace" and then sending them to someone to ask which one they like better.  Both of these colors are white.  However, White dove has a tiny bit of black and yellow in it, and Chantilly Lace has a tiny bit of Black and Blue in it.  Seeing them on their own they look like white... however in a cell phone picture side by side you can definitely see the difference. Now, can you tell from those pictures how each of those colors will look in a room, probably not.  However if you know you want a "cool" white rather than a "warm" white and you want to know the relative difference between the two then the cellphone picture can do that.

How is this still be debated? The fact that you can hear differences is not the issue. What underlying reasons could there be....?🤔

It is all noise, nothing but....just like with pictures and colors on your monitor.

lol! Never mind that professional photographers use their (yes, typically well-calibrated) computer monitors to process and fine tune their images prior to printing.