I am not against "transparent" design...But mass market minimal design standards cannot be high end craftmanship...
But i cannot accept that some use these set of measures to disparage human hearings are passively subject of illusions, some will reduced all human hearing abilities as illusions of only subjective nature with no objective informative content useful for new design , not only to create "colorful" tubes amp but better gear in the larger sense by using human ears as a guide... This stance about linear measure of circuits with no need of the designer ears guiding rudder contradict basic psycho-acoustics... We analyse sound non linearly and we live in a time dependant dimension for this analysis and frequecies dont tell all the story... This means something for design theory...
I cannot repeat what Van Maanen taught , i am not competent and it will be too long..
There is materials physical and sensible invariants , information , behind sound experience not just abstract waves analysed for frequencies spectrum , and amplitude phase and duration and distortion, and not just subjective delusions, these physical invariants go deeper in hearing theory than just frequency based circuits analysis and told us something about human hyperacuity as Magnasco and Oppenheim called it... These materials invariant of qualitative information content are not measured by the tools Amir used, they exist for the ears who perceived them in his time dependant domain and extract from them in a non linear way much qualitative information ...
Thanks for your kind balanced answer...
Read this if you want to guess what these qualities perceived by human hearings are...I read the author thesis..,
Listening and hearing are not DECEPTIVE activity as claim those who want complete faith in their very limited set of measures as the ABSOLUTE METER for "musicality " in gear design...I dont go with ideology sorry... Not in audio not in any subject...I think alone with books and scientists not sellers ...Psycho-acoustic use measures to elucidate hearings very deep matter not to reduce it to mere subjective illusions for the benefit of some limited set of gear measures sold as TRUTH..
In a word there is a deep relation between sound perception and the production of sound by the body, negating this powerful informative feed back circle and claiming that a short set of linear measures can settle audio gear quality forever without any need to listenings , because it is merely delusions, this is not science, this is ideology, and had nothing to do with psycho-acoustic... Amir Measure are useful... Nobody oppose that.. But selling them as the last words with no need for qualitative listenings is going too much farther... Audiophiles are no more deluded than people of ASR with their toy tools.. And blind test do not replace listening training with acoustic and musician training or the trained ears of a designer ...
Classyfying all people in audiophiles subjectivists all in error and ASR objectivist as living is truth , is marketing fetichism not psycho-acoustic...
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@mahgister Well, I just skimmed that response a bit but, yes, it certainly is possible to build audio reproduction systems that have colored sound that some people might prefer (tube and vinyl aficionados rejoice!), but in reality these were always stopgaps towards perfect fidelity due to the limitations of the devices. But some folks prefer them, so be it.
But with the advent of better technologies and the theories that guide their use, we can build remarkably transparent systems for low cost these days, so the limitations of those other approaches become more obvious. There is some research that shows that hypersonic sounds (>20kHz) might cause some brain activity changes, but it’s unclear whether that is definitive for providing perceptually-relevant high-frequency components that would enhance our temporal experience of music, etc.
If you want to know what people want from speakers, you just need to study them and come up with a crowd-sourced preference curve, for instance. And lo, we have one.
But in any case, I remain perplexed what you hope to gain by pushing this line? If you have a desire to research how to color sounds to enhance audio enjoyment, please do the work. I will be interested (if it’s well-written and coherent). Nothing you mention has any bearing on testing whether audio devices are high quality from the standard of low noise and distortion. It is orthogonal to those goals.