Can You Hear Me Now


In an interview with Laurence Borden of Dagogo, Dr Earl Geddes talked about the ability of people to really have golden ears. In his work at Ford, he tried to gauge how good the ten member golden ear panel was. I will let him tell you his findings. “For the most part the study concluded that this panel was “not capable.” In other words their judgments could not be relied upon to be statistically stable. That said, there were two members of the ten who were capable, so it was possible. But the real point here is that someone is not a good judge of sound quality just because they think that they are – all ten members would have claimed that they were audiophiles and good judges of sound quality.
After several more studies along these same lines, I came to conclude that the more someone claimed to be a “golden ear” the less likely it was that they actually were.”  
That got me thinking: how many of our members would belong to the group of eight and how many would be with the two who could really hear. Interesting reading. The full interview can be found here:
https://www.dagogo.com/an-interview-with-dr-earl-geddes-of-gedlee-llc/
N.B. Dr. Earl Geddes is one of the pioneers of the Distributed Bass Array system. His work on the subject is well known. 
spenav
Go to a concert to hear an artist three nights in a row and you will undoubtedly have a favorite of the three.  Now go and listen to the same artist and three different venues and again you will have a favorite.

Same artist every time...which was the golden ears/musically perfect event for you?  Would it be the same even for others?  If a survey were done and there was a majority preferred event, could that sound be replicated in the future with DSP tailored to the specific venue?

Early in this hobby, I cared about golden ear equipment and golden ear opinions....not so much any more.  To paraphrase Terry London....its the goosebumps that matter.

But that doesn't mean that golden ears aren't important.  Designers need to be able to correlate golden ear sound, with the sound they are proposing to market and with sound that buyers will actually buy.

The Harman work as well as the work of others that are trying to correlate various aspects of sound with preferences is important...but so is knowing that we all have biases and these biases may be an important contributor to why some hobbyist are never really satisfied with the sound they have achieved.