"Andre Jute" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Nov 4, 6:52 am, Patrick Turner wrote:

Musicians do not necessarily have any special hearing abilities.

They are also not immune to hearing damage, even occupationally-related.

Yes, they do: they have trained perception.

But they are not unique in that regard.

Also, what they listen for is not necessarily the same as what you listen
for when you listen for differences between audio products.

They listen consciously.

That's hardly unique to musicians.

Non-audiophiles from the general population cannot even hear the
difference between a boombox played through good speakers and a Class
A PP tube amp played through the same speakers.

Boomboxes rarely if ever have speaker outputs, so this is a nonsense
statement.

To them it is all "nice", useless for tests.

I've done enough listening tests with non-audiophiles and non-musicans to be
careful about putting them all down.

If I could find enough experienced audiophiles -- defined as having
trained their own aural perception -- available on a regular basis, I
would use them instead.

Been there done that. BTW, one good way for audiophiles to train their
perceptions is to spend some time actually listening for differences that
are known to be audible, but perhaps neer the margin of audibility.

it was just easier in my particular
circumstances to find as many classical musicians as required.

I've definately worked with classical musicans with serious ear damage.
While they generally have good acuity when it comes to tone and timing,
there's a lot that goes wrong in audio that is independent of that.

It should also be observed that most audiophiles talk big about their
golden ears but in blind tests have poor discrimination, so that you
first require tests to sort out the good listeners.

It is true that the high end audio industry pretty much trains audiophiles
to have a very optimistic view of their hearing acuity.

That shocked me;
for a while I wondered if the meterheads weren't right, if vanishing
THD numbers aren't the holy grail after all... But you don't want to
hear about the anguish of an open mind.

No danger of hearing about the anguish of an open mind from Jute, his
sockpuppets, and his fellow-travelers.

For the innocent: The point of listening tests isn't to discover which
amp or topology is "better": I already know from comparison with years
in the concert halls which kinds of amps and which topologies I prefer
(Class A1 triodes or trioded pentodes in PP with ESL, and ditto in SET
with horns).

Thanks for admitting that you already know the right answers, Jute.

The point of tests is to determine why these topologies
affect the emotions differently; psycho-acoustics is probably the last
frontier in audio-electronics.

So far I have yet to see a credible statement about psychoacoustics from
you, Jute.

Andre Jute
"I was at a board meeting for the LA Chapter of the Audio Engineering
Society last night on XM Satellite radio audio and data transmission.
Sadly, we missed you there, and at the SMPTE and Acoustical Society
recent meetings as well. Everyone was asking, 'Where is that wonderful
Andre Jute? The world just doesn't rotate without him...'" -- John
Mayberry, Emmaco

More likely, they were asking why XP used to sound so much better, but now
generally sounds like crap. The answer is bandwidth and what happens to
audio when you try to route twice as many channels through the same
bandwidth.