I like your post..because of these points in your post :
It changed my opinion on DACs. There is very little difference.
--Dac is a mature technology now and it made no sense to pay too much for a dac relatively to the other components...It is my opinion and experience...
I also differ from ASR’s view on room acoustics and loudspeakers. There are big differences in data and perceptions, where ASR insists that research suggests, that people don’t care.
-- Subjectivist or objectivist focussing on gear miss the more powerful impact of acoustuic and psycho-acoustic basic in a room...
But you are wrong here:
The ears are very bad sensors compared to the eyes
Hearing give us insight inside resonant sound sources and information about their composition, even when not visible...( is it metal,copper or iron, or wood, it is empty orc d3ense, is there a hole, is this fruit ripe or not by tapping on it etc)
We can replace sight with echolocalization exactly as bat and dolphin do... There is even school that taught this for blind people...
Hearing is the FIRST sense which put us in contact with the world through the mother womb, and the LAST sense to disapear... And In coma hearing work not sight ...
And about "information processing" :
«For the first time, physicists have found that humans can discriminate a sound’s frequency (related to a note’s pitch) and timing (whether a note comes before or after another note) more than 10 times better than the limit imposed by the Fourier uncertainty principle.»
https://phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.html
Also, " sounds communicate to the brain far more quickly than sights. Light travels faster than sound, but its pathway to the conscious brain is much slower. “While vision maxes out at 15 to 25 events per second, hearing is based on events that occur thousands of times per second.”
«Nowhere are the limitations of the eye relative to the ear more apparent than when comparing frame rate, measured in frames per second (FPS), to the precedence effect. If 10 still images were flashed in one second (10 FPS), people can distinguish between the photos. Once a rate of 12 FPS is exceeded, though, it’s more likely the person will perceive motion rather than images.
A comparable measure in hearing occurs with the precedence effect. If two sounds occur back to back with a sufficiently small amount of time between them, humans hear a single auditory image. For this to occur, though, the time interval may have to be as low as 10 milliseconds. Additionally, it’s still possible to hear ascension or descension in the sound — it just appears as a single tone.»
About illusion:
«Everyone has been fooled by optical illusions. Something similar is possible when listening to audio, but this occurrence is much rarer. In fact, it takes a bit of visual trickery to fool the human ear via the McGurk Effect.
To put it simply, the McGurk Effect occurs when a listener hears a word but sees different visual cues. If the word “bar” is spoken while someone’s lips move as if making an “F” sound, for instance, the listener typically will “hear” the word “far” instead.
This means that, just like the eye, the human ear can be fooled, but it takes a little visual help to pull it off.»
https://backtracks-blog.com/when-hearing-is-better-than-seeing-the-power-of-the-ear-exposed/
Also the short time visual memory is better than hearing short time memory...No comparison here...but it is the reverse completely for long term hearing memory compared to visual long term memory...there is no comparison either here...
It is way better to loose sight than hearing, guess why?
You can communicate if you are not deaf and replace sight to some extent with echolocalization, but you cannot replace hearing for communication and navigation... As said the mathematician Euler losing sight, it is a good thing for my concentration...Ask Beethoven his opinion ? Ask Ray Charles who gave his money to a deaf childs , not a blind one; and to the journalist who made the documentary very surprized by this, and who ask WHY ? Ray answered laughing, being blind is no problem at all...
Last thing :
Audio people think that to learn how to listen we must change the components and listening to the results... This is very deceptive and push people to meaningless strings of upgrades... and they will NEVER learn how to listen sounds in this exclusive way... We learn to hear when we LISTEN using acoustic concepts in simple basic experiments...No other way... As Musician learn how to listen by playing ...
