Thanks for this. When I was starting out in a professional career in broadcast audio production three decades ago, I would come across what were referred to at the time as “underground audio publications,” most with a decidedly subjectivist bent. When the reviewers wandered into attempts at technical explanations for things they were hearing or were imagining they were hearing, this allegation of the audibility of phase shift within the context of a single channel of audio was a common go-to. I would wonder, “why can’t I hear what’s they’re talking about?” As I absorbed knowledge from more scholarly sources, I put together what was going on: the reviewers were basing their conclusions not on the way audio and hearing work, but rather on the way they ”thought” things work. The phenomenon extends far beyond audio equipment reviewing, into quack medicine, essential oils and the anti-MGO movement, all based on nonsense. Having majored in speech communication in college (to replace the Louisiana Creole French dialect of American English I got from my Mom,) I also had some courses in speech therapy and audiology that helped to explain away some of the golden ear reviewers’ misassessments of reality. I realize that sometimes reviewers really do hear an existing phenomenon, but ought to stop short of explaining the cause based on hearsay or nonsense. I can’t let this topic pass without stating a global caution on subjective testing of any audio phenomena: the placebo effect is powerful in hearing and listening, and believe me I’ve snowed myself into thinking I was hearing things that weren’t really there, as verified by learning that for example the signal path wasn’t configured exactly as I had assumed, on countless occasions.
