When we hear a sound we hear and recognize a quality ... This quality is related to some physical invariant of the vibrating sound source ...and we localize this quality in space ...
The medium around it and the waves coming from it they convey an image of this invariant ,which is immediately meaningful for us, invariant we perceive in the vibrating sound source through the medium and with the waves as a living map of the quality which is the real territory...
But the medium, the waves, the Fourier linear map of the territory, are not the vibrating sound source invariant we interpreted as a quality, they are an image of it , the informative quality is not in the electrical measures nor in the medium or in the waves , it is perceived through them and with them but is not them ...
If i tap a fruit, the quality ripeness is not in the Fourier map which is an image of some physical invariant of the vibrating sound source ( the fruit )
Then it is ridiculous to confuse a perceived quality with a set of electrical measures , or even with a Fourier map...Human hearing live in his own time domain by evolutive constraint , we must had learn speech perception for example for survival and then the ear/brain had to learn how to beat the Fourier limit between frequencies and time almost 13 times in some case in qualitative information retrieval ....
As we learned in the ecological theory of perception by Gibson, the brain does not compute the qualities (affordance) of the environment he directly use them , he participate and anticipate ...It is the same for hearing... The brain does not compute the timbre characteristics or the spatial qualities and distance of the various sound sources as a computer must do; the brain perceive difference in time and frequencies as perceived qualities immediately meaningful ...
Then electrical measures dont inform us about sound qualities but about some qualities of the design ...There is many other parameters in a design connected in some room to other devices and the most important parameter will be the hearing individual ...
Once this is said, a good designer could replicate a soundfield created by tubes with a S.S. design ... Bob Carver did it ... But this craftmanship go well beyond few basic electrical measures defined as the specs of an amplifier ...
