"I Trust My Ears"

@devinplombier ah well. Their loss.

@devinplombier

"The point of this thread is that sound quality is determined not by our ears but by our brains. Our ears merely transduce the sound waves. Our brains make value judgements as to what sounds good, or which one between A and B sounds better."

It's not always that simple though, especially with music that is somewhat out of the mainstream. As an example, take a punk rock band like the Ramones (who I'm not all that familiar with btw), who were clearly not proficient at playing their instruments, at least not in any normal sense. Another example might be highly improvised avant garde jazz with all the distortion and bleating, etc.  So if you're not familiar with those genres, the first thing that needs to happen is for your ears to absorb as much of the music as they can.

The next step might normally be for your brain to analyze it and determine if it's "good" or not. But before you get to that step, your brain (and emotions) have for first define what constitutes good with respect to this particular music. One might consider the Ramones nonconventional type of music good if it accomplishes what it set out to do even if it might not actually sound good. As far as I understand it, the intent of the Ramones through their playing and lyrics and stage presence was to make a social and political (or maybe it's asocial and apolitical) statement about adolescent life during that time period. 

So it's only after you've arrived at a conclusion about what the musicians are trying to do and say that you can then go about assessing whether they accomplished their goal, i.e. was their music good in the context that music isn't just all about the notes and how they're played.

It's late here so I hope that makes some kind of sense.

Apophenia is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things or random patterns, often leading to false interpretations or beliefs.

Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive a meaningful image or pattern where none actually exists. It's essentially the human brain's habit of finding familiar forms in random or ambiguous stimuli, like seeing faces in clouds or hearing voices in static. This phenomenon is a type of apophenia, the broader tendency to find patterns and meaning in random data. 

The point is, your ears can be trusted, they just convert vibrations to neural impulses for your brain to interpret. It's your brain, that most easily fooled of human organs, that cannot be trusted.

Our ears aren't actually passive sensors -  they have active components. Our ears are suceptible to biomechanical damage which can affect our auditory perception. So both our ears and brain have a role to play.

The OP is only half right.  Yes, the brain is the CPU (Central Processing Unit) that processes and defines what the ears send to it.  That being said, how many of us get routine audiologic evaluations?  How many of us routinely clean our passive receptors?  Come on now, all you old audiophile farts out there?  When was the last time you had your hearing evaluated or Debroxed your ears?  Are you really convinced your hearing acuity is as sharp today as it was when you were young whipper snappers?  For that matter, how many professional audiophile reviewers get regular/routine audiologic evaluations?  Perhaps this little tidbit of CV should be listed or documented right before their personal impressions and specifications & measurements in reviews?

As for the requirement of decades or even years of training to teach our ears and/or brain to truly comprehend what they are sensing, well, I'm sure that kind of training investment is required for competently reading or deciphering XRAY, MRI, EKG, EEG and other such telemetry.  However, for music appreciation, I think the old adage applies:  "You don't have to know much about art to know what you like."