Can You Hear Me Now


In an interview with Laurence Borden of Dagogo, Dr Earl Geddes talked about the ability of people to really have golden ears. In his work at Ford, he tried to gauge how good the ten member golden ear panel was. I will let him tell you his findings. “For the most part the study concluded that this panel was “not capable.” In other words their judgments could not be relied upon to be statistically stable. That said, there were two members of the ten who were capable, so it was possible. But the real point here is that someone is not a good judge of sound quality just because they think that they are – all ten members would have claimed that they were audiophiles and good judges of sound quality.
After several more studies along these same lines, I came to conclude that the more someone claimed to be a “golden ear” the less likely it was that they actually were.”  
That got me thinking: how many of our members would belong to the group of eight and how many would be with the two who could really hear. Interesting reading. The full interview can be found here:
https://www.dagogo.com/an-interview-with-dr-earl-geddes-of-gedlee-llc/
N.B. Dr. Earl Geddes is one of the pioneers of the Distributed Bass Array system. His work on the subject is well known. 
spenav

Showing 1 response by nonoise

Great sommeliers rate about the same, I would think. Same goes for those who work in the perfume industry. We’re talking about a curve for rating the senses. It’s a given. How unusual is 20/15 vision? Fighter pilots have 20/10 vision.

If we’re talking about maybe 20% of us having better hearing than "normal", what’s all the hub, bub? If there are 10 million audiophiles in this country, then at least 2 million know what they’re hearing.

Considering that our hearing acuity is part of what attracted us to this hobby to begin with, it’s a good bet that a normal curve of, say, 20% for the general population would work out to maybe 40-50% for audiophiles because of our abilities. 

I can’t imagine tone deaf people flocking to our hobby though I think I’ve encountered some here.

All the best,
Nonoise