Can you trust your ears?

[purite audio]

http://www.nousaine.com/pdfs/Can%20Y...our%20Ears.pdf

Keith.

[The Barbarian]

Never trust your ears always let Techcnical specs decide, that's right innit?

[Reffc]

I think that the moral isn't "never trust your ears" but it is "never trust what someone tells you to hear". Technical specs don't come into it really.

[The Barbarian]

for those that missed my sarcasm ..Tech specs mean absolutly nothing to me.

[Macca]

I don't think it is impossible to eliminate bias, unlike the author. Ear-brain isn't the same thing as eye-brain so the optical illusion examples fall don right away. And feeling cold when you get out of a swimming pool is nothing to do with expectation bias so what that is doing in there I can only guess.

I like to go with my gut. As soon as you start internally or externally attempting to verbalise what you hear then you are lost.

Not so easy if you are comparing two cables, for example. But in that situation I have a simple maxim - if I find myself in the least bit pondering over whether there is a difference then there almost certainly isn't one.

[Marco]

I like to go with my gut. As soon as you start internally or externally attempting to verbalise what you hear then you are lost.

Yup... I usually put it as: 'ultimately trust your ears', as in after exhausting every test procedure you choose to participate in (should you wish to take that route), in order to validate what you're hearing, and taking into consideration the results that they produce, but let you ears be the final arbiter.

Ears, of course, aren't infallible, but neither are test procedures. At the end of the day, after taking everything into account, I'll take the balance of fallibility of my senses, and go with my gut feeling

Marco.

[Oldpinkman]

I don't think it is impossible to eliminate bias, unlike the author. Ear-brain isn't the same thing as eye-brain so the optical illusion examples fall don right away. And feeling cold when you get out of a swimming pool is nothing to do with expectation bias so what that is doing in there I can only guess.

I like to go with my gut. As soon as you start internally or externally attempting to verbalise what you hear then you are lost.

Not so easy if you are comparing two cables, for example. But in that situation I have a simple maxim - if I find myself in the least bit pondering over whether there is a difference then there almost certainly isn't one.

It isn't a question of ear-brain or eye-brain. Its brain. I mentioned an example Sue complained of with "hearing a song in her head". Currently mine is "Fly me to the moon" sung by a girl who looks like Catherine Tate and plays for the Ukelele Orchestra of the United Kingdom. But I hear her. No ears involved. The McGurk effect which was illustrated on the forum earlier clearly demonstrates how the brain works. It not only interferes with what the ears provide, it allows visual stimuli to over-ride its own reason. We know he is saying "Baa". He is as a question of fact saying "Baa". Our minds know that once the trick has been revealed. We hear "Faa" when we look at him. Close our eyes and we hear "Baa". But open our eyes and we hear "Faa".

And the basic point he is making about it being possible to manufacture a situation where you hear a difference where there isnt one is manifestly true. The McGurk effect being one example. But again as he points out, if you listen to the same, identically the same, piece of music you will hear differences. That is you notice and give more priority to aspects on different auditions. I had a recent somewhat embarrassing reminder of that on my recent (pre-Christmas) auditioning of Flamenca for Arthur. The testing was blind, but he played me in sighted. So he TOLD me it was A A B and still I heard a difference between A and A and commented on it.

Of course what we hear is both final arbiter and all that really matters to us as "audiophiles" (dreadful term). And it is obvious to use "the ears are" for "what we hear is" - although what we hear has a great deal to do with the brain and not the ears. But it is important to recognise the bias (implies cheating, so new word needed) the variations that we perceive between auditions. A lesson I learned 20 years ago making a tit of myself at PT hearing things that weren't there.

One final example of how the brain processes. When we take our head and ears into a concert hall to hear an Orchestra I hear that as "flat" - ie perfect audio. Actually, what my ear drum receives, is far from a flat frequency response that a measurement mike in free air would "hear" because of the shape of my ear and ear canal, as Owen demonstrated to me with his artificial head when we were doing the headphone plots. My brain processes it to flat for me. We can't stop our brains doing that. We can take account of the brain when evaluating what we "hear". If you are developing product to sell, you need to do that.

Back to the last of the tax returns

[Ammonite Audio]

One final example of how the brain processes. When we take our head and ears into a concert hall to hear an Orchestra I hear that as "flat" - ie perfect audio. Actually, what my ear drum receives, is far from a flat frequency response that a measurement mike in free air would "hear" because of the shape of my ear and ear canal, as Owen demonstrated to me with his artificial head when we were doing the headphone plots. My brain processes it to flat for me. We can't stop our brains doing that. We can take account of the brain when evaluating what we "hear". If you are developing product to sell, you need to do that.

What you say is correct, but neglects to stress that the sound as gathered by the pinna is, in simple terms, flat. The ear canal has its own properties and a transfer function is necessary if measurements at the ear drum are to properly reflect the sound arriving at the outer ear. That's why the KEMAR artificial test fixture (dummy torso) has accurately machined resonating elements designed into its ears.