"Andy Evans" wrote in message

As they say, audio is engineering, music is art.

...you can see engineering, you can touch engineering and you can
measure engineering but you can't hear engineering.

I don't know about that "You can't hear engineering" stuff. You can
definately hear some examples of bad engineering.

Isn't hearing phenomena called psychoacoustics?

It's related.

"Psychoacoustics can be defined simply as the psychological study of
hearing."

You have obviously not read some of the best-known and classic works related
to psychoustics, Zwicker and Fastl for example.

The aim of psychoacoustic research is to find out how
hearing works.

That's more like it.

In other words, the aim is to discover how sounds
entering the ear are processed by the ear and the brain in order to
give the listener useful information about the world outside.

That goes well afield of "the psychological study of hearing". For example,
psychoacoustics included the physiological study of hearing.

Some of the hot areas of psychoacoustic research at the time of writing
a

How do we separate sounds occurring simultaneously (e.g. two speakers
speaking at once)?

A mixture of temporal and spectral separation of sounds and decoding.

How do we localize sounds in space?

A mixture of temporal and spectral analysis of sounds.

How do we determine the pitch of, say, a musical instrument?

That's spectral analysis.

How does the cochlea separate a complex sound into its different
frequency components?

Vibrating hairs acting on the basilar membrane activating nerves connected
to the brain.

Determining the abilities and limitations of human hearing is
invaluable in helping us to use sounds in our environment.

The biggest milestone in psychoacoustics to date is arguably perceptual
coding, an example of which is the well-known MP3 coding of music and
speech. It's an interesting process - the information content of sounds are
reduced by 90% or more with minimal perceptual loss.

Any device that produces sound for the purpose of human listening should
take
account of what the listener's ears are going to do with that sound."

Which is one reason why I don't take all those earnest reports of sonic
differences due to different choices among well-engineered capacitors, too
seriously.