Can You Hear Me Now

Agreed, before we can discuss this intelligently we need to see the documentation. And hear the implementation. Hence my question.

This is the best thread topic I have had the joy of reading for a long time, like going back to grad school.  A huge shout out to Teo and Mahgister for their erudition, and especially the tutorial about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, something I long suspected and now see that it an acknowledged phenomenon.  My audiologist would never suggest that I have Golden Ears, but I have been devoted to acquiring great gear to listen to music in my home and have enjoyed every minute of the experience for nearly 50 years.  Now folks can get back to the current discussion of the $85 rocks to put on top of their equipment, a fun discussion, but largely pretty silly.  

If there are golden ears it isn't the hearing ability that is golden it's the ability of the listener to interpret and to what he can hear and to retain as much of it in memory. It's the brain and the listener's experience and concentration that may be golden. The actual hearing of the ear is way down the list.

Correct. We don't even know how to test even the most rudimentary aspects of hearing. We use test tones and this leads us to say high frequency hearing declines with age. But read up on it, this tests only the inner ear cells that detect tones like sine waves. There are THREE TIMES as many that detect transients and timing, they involve frequencies much higher than 20kHz (which is why supertweeters work) and these it seems DO NOT decline with age. 

Case in point. Actual real world demonstration. Discovered by accident. One of the XLO demagnetizing tracks is a sweep tone that goes to 20kHz. To my ears it trails off to nothing but one audiophile is screaming how it hurts his ears. Really? You hear that? Yeah! Tell me when you no longer hear it. And he goes to darn near 20kHz! 

We didn't do a test to see if it was the Moab or the Townshend Supertweeter he was hearing. Doesn't matter. Point is, he not only heard that sine wave it was excruciatingly loud.

Yet when we played music on that same system, no problem. Hearing is completely different for sine waves as complex music sounds. We are not microphones. We do not record acoustic phenomena. Music is a human experience. Listening is an intellectual activity.

On a slightly different vein, how many folks are aware of Arthur B. Lintgen, MD, who could reliably identify recordings by examining the grooves on an LP.  The powers of perception that some folks have is simply amazing.  I clearly don't have any such skills, but do have immense respect for those that do and that makes me very happy. 

https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/vinyl-vision-meet-the-man-who-can-identify-a-record-by-its-grooves/

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.