So, you don't trust your ears?
I suppose this thread comes down to whether you 'trust' your ears or not.
In this specific sense I do not
; reasons are threefold:
- Sensory adaptation is a fact of human life. We'll get used to various sound signatures with enough exposure.
- Human perception (also cognition) is demonstrably fallible and unreliable.
- Reliable auditory memory of sound signatures is short in humans.
It is not to say I never can perceive differences, just that what I perceive may not always be consistent - with either my previous experiences or even with reality
- it is simply one of the facts of being a human being
Sure, but there are not insignificant differences between the best measuring speakers, enough to have me favour one or the other. You are more likely to hit the target if you pick something that measures well, but listening first should increase this likelihood of success further still, or don't you agree?
Different well-measuring speakers sound audibly different, that is considered settled, but assuming no overload condition and similar low-frequency extension the differences between such are IME usually not really night-and day. I find the implied argument that someone might find one well-measuring loudspeaker great and another one impossible to live with unlikely (though not necessarily impossible). It sounds like a potential straw-man argument to me.
People find great satisfaction in listening/comparing/tweaking various pieces of gear and that is absolutely fine - it is a hobby after all.
After pursuing that for a while I found it is not my cup of tea - I personally find audible differences after a certain point are no longer a question of better or worse, just different (often slightly). Once I get to that point I can enjoy the music equally on any such piece of gear.
That doesn't mean that I don't enjoy learning about audio or doing certain type of equipment testing - I very much still do
Of course in the end people should pick whatever rocks their boat!
Is that nonsense though? I mean the recording techniques are quite different, not to mention the effects used in mixing rock will be absent in chamber/orchestral music.
There is not really a consistent sound signature to any genre of music, IMHO. Even each artist's own discography often contains tracks and albums with widely varying sound signatures between themselves (from tonality to amount of dynamic compression).
IMHO sound quality of the recording itself is the single most varying and deciding factor in reproduced sound quality - it is a losing game trying to fix that with gear selection.
It is like trying to remaster an already mastered recording and hoping the same fix would apply to any other recording - even if we manage to fix one, the same fix will only work for recordings with compatible deficiencies while at the same time it might exacerbate issues in other recordings.
In the end I am of the position that a loudspeaker is a reproduction device and should be equally successful in reproducing various types of sound, including different music recordings. In my experience loudspeakers with flattish on-axis and even off-axis radiation do just that.
