The following article by noted audio engineer Ethan Winer offers a cogent explanation for why we believe what we hear. As Winer explains, two people each claiming to hear different things can actually both be right:
"I Trust My Ears"
Do you? Can you? Should you?
I don’t. The darn things try to trick me all the time!
Seriously, our ears are passive sensors. They forward sonic data to our brains. Ears don’t know if the data in question represents a child crying, a Chopin prelude, or a cow dropping a cowpie. That’s our brains’ job to figure out.
Similarly, our brains decide whether A sounds better than B, whether a component sounds phenomenal, etc.
So, "I trust my ears" should really be "I trust my brains".
And that has a different ring to it, doesn’t it?