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Are you, PhD in Physics at Stanford and all, satisfied with the answers and other relevant discussion that followed your post?So why does no one ever take the next logical step?
Which is: speaker sound quality is irrelevant.
If it really is nearly impossible to tell by extended listening to a single pair of speakers whether they are "good" or not, then just buy the cheapest. You won't hear the difference after a month, according to these claims.
Or if the visual impression of speakers really does overwhelm the sonic impression (as those who say sighted listening is useless would assert), then we should all be buying speakers based on looks alone, and ignoring sonics.
Because you have a habit on ASR of blanking audio science that doesn't suit your personal biases and preconceptions. Not sure if it's because you nurse a hierarchy of sciences that places audio science, especially the perceptual aspects, way down the ladder below hard physics, or just a bit of a blind spot.
I take your question above to be sarcasm, because it's too obvious that, just for starters, the cheapest speakers won't even play deep bass, and furthermore, nobody has claimed that adaptation makes everything sound the same. It just describes our tendency to 'settle'.... but only as long as we avoid comparisons. As soon as the aspirational audiophile who has adapted to his (or her) cheapest speakers encounters superb speakers it won't take him (or her) two seconds to exclaim "oh gawd my speakers are sh*t". Then when he (etc) returns home how do you think that is going to play out? Knowing for certain how poor one's speakers are will have built cognitive bias against them that will wrestle with the (gradually returning) adaptation, and cognitive bias tends to win out. Our audiophile will maintain the opinion his speakers are sh*t even as he re-adapts. It won't end well for his cheapest speakers.
The fact that Matt fell for your comment and mistook it for a powerful argument, .... oh well. We've gotten used to that.