There are a lot of armchair quarterbacks in the world regarding a nearly endless variety of topics. My knowledge of audio isn't even in the same realm as the guys who invented things like MP3 or AAC. The mere idea of removing audio but not having it be audible kind of amazes me. It's much harder in concept than something you can see and magnify and freeze frame (like JPEG). But it IS amazing how little the average person knows about well...just about anything really and yet so many have such
strong opinions about things of which they are mostly ignorant. Hearing a "difference" is a very psychological thing. I point back to what I wrote earlier about the Coke Vs. Pepsi challenge from so many years ago. It's SO EASY to fool the human brain it's unreal. You can't trust your senses when things are just varied a tiny bit in ways you don't recognize.
Volume changes are the equivalent of sugar content in the Pepsi/Coke challenge. People normally prefer the drink with more sugar, particularly when given first (it makes the less sweet drink taste odd/bad. Just suck on a lemon first and you can taste SOME sweetness along with sour if you pay attention. Eat some chocolate first and then taste a lemon. The lemon will taste nothing but sour). A slight volume change and people normally prefer the LOUDER of the two, even if they are IDENTICAL sources. Ever listen to a USB stick in the car with songs on it and you set the volume for the song that's playing and then a much quieter song comes on next and it sounds like crap? If you turn up the volume it sounds great again. But then play the previous song and you're blasted out of your seat. But your brain doesn't always just say, "It's too quiet" especially if you're in a quiet car where you can easily hear the quiet passages. But things like bass get exponentially louder to the brain as they pass certain thresholds (i.e. Humans do NOT hear in a linear fashion at all in terms of frequency response OR volume and most people don't know that either!)
I've done the beer snob thing and to a lesser extent wine and Scotch whiskey. Sometimes the higher priced stuff does taste better and sometimes it does not. But there is always peer pressure in any group to go along with the bandwagon so-to-speak. Tell someone a $6 wine tastes as good as a $600 one and they will berate you right out of the room. Do a double-blind test and even the wine snobs get testy when they can't tell which is the more expensive wine. That's because it's based on rarity of grapes, age of vintages, reputation of the vineyard, etc. etc. and the damn grapes don't know they are supposed to be inferior to other grapes. They're all still made from fermented grapes! There's no gold powder added to make that $600 wine worth more! Yeah, sometimes cheaper crap is cheaper for a reason and sometimes it's just snobby nonsense. Are certain painters really worth MILLIONS for their art while more life-like paintings done by nobodies worth almost nothing? That depends on whether you're an art critic or not. I personally wouldn't pay 10 cents for a Picasso (yeah, whatever the reasons for the distortion, it doesn't resonate with me), but Bob Ross from PBS always amazed me with his landscape paintings and he could paint them all day long like they were nothing. Art critics hate Thomas Kincade, but they look pretty nice to me (I'm not crazy about them like my mother, though).
But ART is one thing and ACCURACY is another. You can't really argue about preferences except for peer group pressures of society, etc. But you can measure accuracy in many ways and you can measure ability to hear differences with carefully done double blind testing and thus can at least disprove SOME of the more ridiculous claims made about playback technologies. The problem is that too many people push along some pseudo-science nonsense babble and people hear about it and believe it and before you know it, digital sound is "stair-stepped" and even the magazines are describing it that way when it's blatant nonsense.
Even if you can get the truth across to
some people, there's multitudes that still hear the stair-step crap and continue to pass the superstition and BS along. More complex audio discussions aren't always easy to understand in technical terms and most people have ZERO patience to even read more than two sentences these days (hence the limits and popularity of Twitter). You see "TLDR" and you wonder why you wasted your time trying to educate someone when they can't spend 2 minutes reading 3 paragraphs that someone with a better reading ability could read in 20 seconds or less. People ask me why I type so much and part of it is because you can't simplify technical matters into two sentences and when you can type 85-90wpm (I've hit 105 on a good day), it's not that big of a deal either. I can type while I think and then edit. Reading it should be child's play by comparison but people won't bother because they tend to be lazy and ignorant which is often why they don't know WTF they're talking about in the first place.
When I mention snake-oil, people don't even know where that term came from (ironically true snake oil has some health benefits to it, but the term has come to mean any hacked together mixture by people that have little or no real knowledge that has unproven health claims made for it). The reason they could sell "tonics" and other things is because people will believe anything. If you took a tonic for a week and your cold went away, you'd attribute it to the tonic rather than the cold simply running its course, etc. and then recommend it to someone else. Why PROVE it does something? Just buy it. Yeah, that's sounds familiar.
These Shakti stones absorb horrible negative frequencies around your room! Place them near corners and windows and behind your listening location and notice the difference! Look at all these paid people that agree! Buy yours today for only $19.99 and if you order in the next 10 minutes, we'll throw in not one, not two, but three extra stones for the price of one. Just pay extra shipping and handling! (the S&H isn't shown, but it's $30 each for all three, so your total is $110 for three stones you could have dug up in your backyard and washed them off and they'd still do nothing.
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