Why not? Let’s say there is a certain distortion in the sound that a trained listener can spot in a quick test. But someone, who is not trained what to listen for, may spend many days, weeks or even months until he can figure it out, because his brain will be wandering almost randomly consciously focusing on different aspects of the sound at any particular moment. I am not aware of any better explanation of this phenomena than limited bandwidth of conscious mind.
Interesting way to put it. The thing is to assign numbers to your experience to ensure its repeatability and comparison to that of others. That means setting up a strict procedure and documenting the (electrical and other) aspects of your performance. Otherwise:
"How tall are you?"
"I dunno... pretty tall."
"Taller than Brian over in New York?"
"Probably. I'd know if I met him."
"Look at that guy over there. Do you think you're taller than him?"
"Umm... Can't say from where I'm standing."
"I think I'm taller than him too."
"Hey, you, walking over there! How tall are you?"
"Seventeen fists!"
"How tall is that? Whose fist? Hey, what's a fist?"
"A fist is about three thumbs!"
"Thumbs...?"
Etc. and so on. You can replace all the important terms of this conversation with audio-related ones, like distortion, DACs, etc. The "I'd know if I met him" is roughly equivalent to "I'd know what it sounds like if I heard it". What's the point when you can just say "173cm" or "90dB SFDR"? And, oh boy, if you think the arguments on ASR are bad, read about the arguments which founded of the metric system.
For example, see this thread
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/mola-mola-tambaqui-measurements.10693/ or this one
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/msb-dacs-measurements.9112/. The criticisms directed at the articles are about the lack of description of the measurement conditions. It doesn't matter that one uses AP gear or that charts are published instead of single numbers. Both are misleading and even detrimental to helping understand performance. It's no wonder that some see measured data as useless overall, given how sloppily it's presented a lot of the time.
The other thing I'd like to state openly, and I'm not being coy, is that all perception is measurable. The question is simply what you're measuring, how accurate it is and how it's relatable to other kinds of measurements (such as, again, electrical measurements at the output of DACs and amps). It takes a lot of work to understand the relationship. It's like this: you go to doctor because something is wrong with your ears or hearing. If they can't see anything by looking into your ears, they'll conduct a hearing test, and then start on a diagnosis based on the
frequency response of your hearing threshold (among other measurements).
I don't want to make this post longer than it already is, but I think if members are really interested in what can be measured when it comes to human perception then we should switch gears. It would be fun to actually discuss the work done in psychoacoustics/psychophysics as such.
