What are we objectivists missing?

@artemus_5

SCIENTISM IS NOT SCIENCE. you are full of contradictions. On one hand you distrust the senses. Yet you trust the science and the scientific machinery that was developed and brought forth by man’s human senses

So do you trust your speedometer in your car to give you an idea of how fast you are going, or do you go by just watching the terrain go by? Have you ever tried flying an airplane when you don’t have visual reference to the horizon? It’s important to understand in advance that your senses will confuse you in that situation about something as basic as which way is up and which way is down. You can build instruments in advance that are immune to the effect and use their readout to tell you which way is up when your naked senses are disoriented. It's not about not trusting our senses. It's about knowing the limits of our senses and finding ways to augment them. 

@artemus_5  

It's true, the equipment can go wrong sometimes. When it comes to keeping the plane upright without visual access to the horizon the human will go wrong every time. We just can't do it at all. Even birds can't do it. I'm with you though on knowing the limits to our equipment and science. When the science can't explain something we need to acknowledge that and explore it further. First we need to make sure there's actually something there that needs explaining. If someone could deftly maneuver an airplane without visual horizon cues and no attitude instruments, then that would be something to investigate. If they just said they could, not so much. But we could easily put a hood on them and have them demonstrate this ability. If they argued that the hood distracted them, we'd have to wait for actual inclement weather. If they said the presence of an observer or the settings of the test distracted them, or the poor handling characteristics of a perfectly good plane didn't give them enough feedback, I'd just disregard the claim. With audio claims, if someone won't expose themselves to a good blind testing regimen then I'll just accept that they do perceive a difference in non blind testing situations but I've got no reason to infer it's anything beyond just a perception. I'm personally interested in these sighted perceptual effects but see no reason to assume they're actually caused by a meaningful change in the sound that's reaching their ears. 

I'm totally for people sharing their subjective preferences. I take them seriously and accept that they really do prefer the equipment they say they do under the conditions they are using it. If they don't care about how measurements might correlate to sound preferences that's perfectly ok. No need to do blind testing if you're not interested. 

To answer the OP post, all evidence suggests that under properly controlled conditions we do know how to measure audio signals in a way that accounts for the limits of human hearing. In uncontrolled, sighted settings there are a huge number of variables that change our overall perception of sound quality. Nevertheless, between any two models of speakers  it's easy to measure differences that fall within the known abilities of human hearing, often even between two speakers of the same make. There can be all kinds of interesting interactions between different components, such as amps and speakers, or even pre-amps and amps, and dacs and pre-amps, and even the cables used to connect them. This need not be the case, but it might be preferred to introduce audible non linear responses between these devices to give people room to tailor their sound by mixing and matching components. I believe that almost any speaker in any room can benefit from a little EQ - unless someone just hit the jackpot with the perfect match of room and speaker. Sometimes a little noise and distortion of the right kind can be nice too.

Objectivists are just subjectivists calling out nonsense objective claims made by some subjectivists.