Yet another convincing nail in the already-well-nailed coffin in which we need to officially bury the idea that sighted comparison listening is any kind of pathway to discovery about the sound waves from music playback gear.
And, by extension, bury all notion that the sighted listening audio gear reviewer has anything to offer the audio gear consumer, other than artful deception of a willing subject.
^^^^ And here we see yet again the naive overreach concerning the reliability of our senses and perception.
It's similar to leaping from studies showing we experience optical illusions to "therefore our sense of sight is wholly illusory and unreliable."
And yet, we manage to find our way out the front door whenever we want. And navigate the world mostly successfully using our sight and other senses.
It reminds me of the "Philosophy 101 Student Phenomenon," where a student encounters the case for skepticism for the first time, e.g. Descartes challenges to "what we can actually know." They get so besotted with this "discovery" that it can be hard to defend statements of knowledge that they start applying this skepticism everywhere, showing their friends "
you can't really have the knowledge you think you have!"
It's a giddy feeling having the insight that turns over so many other people's apple cart.
But they don't realize the hole they've dug by pulling the rug out from beneath "knowledge." Without building up a concept of "knowledge" WITHIN the confines of PRACTICAL skepticism, they actually leave themselves incoherent. (If we "can't "really" know anything in the empirical realm, how would this skepticism account for, say, people's ability to reliably unlock their smartphones with their password code? If it isn't "knowledge" of their codes in any practical sense accounting for this, what could account for it?)
There's a similar thing that happens in these inferences from experiments cited about our perception, to claims about our perception being so unreliable as to "throw out X, Y and Z as utterly illusory or unwarranted."
Similar theories of predictive coding and the like are posited for our vision - for instance many of the famous optical illusions of how we misinterpret colors and shading in CERTAIN circumstances suggest our brains are working on expectations. But does that warrant the inference "therefore we can not rely on our vision - it's all just illusion and expectation effects?" Of course not. Sense like our vision are successful in allowing us to navigate the world! You have to be able to explain the SUCCESSES, and you can't do that merely by pointing to the particular instances in which vision "fails" to be accurate. It's amazing how often this obvious point passes by those who are thinking only about how an example bolsters skepticism.
So back to theories like predictive coding (as indicated in that study), the basic idea that our brain "constructs" reality "based on expectations."
Well, how could our vision "work" if these "expectations" themselves weren't somehow reliable or reflecting reality? And how do we build this reliable-enough model of "expectations" if our senses were wholly unreliable? Clearly, since we can not be born with some pre-set interpretation of every novel thing we will encounter, our senses, like sight, must be delivering a base level of accurate-enough information which build those expectations in the first place.
Optical illusion experiments uncover the times when this feedback scheme can "get it wrong" but that's actually an insight along the way to the bigger understanding of how we "get so much right!"
Same with the sense-of-hearing study cited here. Some look at this and draw the purely skeptical conclusion
"well guys, gotta throw in the towel on our hearing, it's all expectation bias and illusion, can't trust it!" Which is just going with 1/2 the story.
Of course they don't REALLY disbelieve in the total unreliability of their senses - they get through the day just fine with them. But as a stick to poke at purely subjective listener reports, it seems to edge towards the Philosophy 101 Student syndrome, of special pleading. "
Uncontrolled, sighted listening is entirely unreliable and can be thrown out." It's actually an untenable idea if you follow this through (really, the only thing that can account for my saying a Revel Salon produces more realism and dynamic impact than my iphone speakers is illusion-born-bias?).
Like I've said before on this:
It's one thing to say "
Our perceptions can be in error" but another to say "
our perception always leads to error." The first is tenable and useful, the second untenable overreach.
Similarly it's one thing to say: "
Sighted listening tests are less reliable than controlled listening tests." (See scientific studies showing this).
But another to say "
Sighted listening is WHOLLY unreliable, the results are simply illusory bullshit" (and thus any such accounts are to be rejected, especially sighted listening reports).
The former is tenable, the latter in any practical sense is untenable. And yet the latter sense is often implied or made explicitly in the critique of sighted listening and of course subjective reviewing.
