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"How would someone 'describe' the sound of this headphone based on the numbers ?"
That's certainly true!
However, by saying "someone wouldn't" that reply at least suggests one is ignoring the role of interpretation and intersubjective communication.
The audiophile hobby is not some abstract academic exercise: We only care about measurements insofar as they relate to what we ultimately care about: the subjective impression created by the sound.
Certainly "someone" can gain enough experience in both understanding what is being measured, reading the measurements and...importantly...plenty of experience directly correlating the measurements to what he/she hears. Then, yes, someone can eventually look at a set of speaker measurements and have a good idea "how it will sound." Just as a classical composer or conductor will through study and personal experience eventually be able to look at mere notes on a page and "hear" what the score sounds like.
But not everyone has the time or inclination to put that much effort in to becoming that experienced. How we gain and communicate knowledge has to have a level of pragmatism. That's why we have short hands and various ways of communicating. A physicist could identify the difference between "hotter" and "colder" or "frozen" and "liquid" by looking at the mathematical description, yet it's still useful and far more pragmatic to just use those short-hand terms "colder/hotter/frozen/liquid" to get across the idea in everyday life - terms we've arrived at not by measurements or technical theory, but by Intersubjective communication. In fact, we never even needed to have developed deeply technical understanding of the physics for "hot and cold" to communicate knowledge.
Much of this comes from people experiencing the same thing and agreeing on that subjective experience! (Does that flickering light hurt your fingers too? Yes? Ok, we'll refer to that as "fire" or "too hot..." etc)
Just because one way of understanding or communicating can be numerical doesn't mean "the numbers must speak for themselves" since there can be translation to alternative language.
If a person who is knowledgeable enough to know what a speaker will sound like from looking at the measurements can not also get across the subjective consequences of those measurements in the non-technical intersubjective ways we use to communicate all day, then he wouldn't be much of a teacher.
Someone wouldn't. The numbers "speak" for themselves. In other words, the numbers are a language, and that language is separate and different from the language we use to speak to each other.
And like any language, you have to learn it to be fluent in it.
Jim
That's certainly true!
However, by saying "someone wouldn't" that reply at least suggests one is ignoring the role of interpretation and intersubjective communication.
The audiophile hobby is not some abstract academic exercise: We only care about measurements insofar as they relate to what we ultimately care about: the subjective impression created by the sound.
Certainly "someone" can gain enough experience in both understanding what is being measured, reading the measurements and...importantly...plenty of experience directly correlating the measurements to what he/she hears. Then, yes, someone can eventually look at a set of speaker measurements and have a good idea "how it will sound." Just as a classical composer or conductor will through study and personal experience eventually be able to look at mere notes on a page and "hear" what the score sounds like.
But not everyone has the time or inclination to put that much effort in to becoming that experienced. How we gain and communicate knowledge has to have a level of pragmatism. That's why we have short hands and various ways of communicating. A physicist could identify the difference between "hotter" and "colder" or "frozen" and "liquid" by looking at the mathematical description, yet it's still useful and far more pragmatic to just use those short-hand terms "colder/hotter/frozen/liquid" to get across the idea in everyday life - terms we've arrived at not by measurements or technical theory, but by Intersubjective communication. In fact, we never even needed to have developed deeply technical understanding of the physics for "hot and cold" to communicate knowledge.
Much of this comes from people experiencing the same thing and agreeing on that subjective experience! (Does that flickering light hurt your fingers too? Yes? Ok, we'll refer to that as "fire" or "too hot..." etc)
Just because one way of understanding or communicating can be numerical doesn't mean "the numbers must speak for themselves" since there can be translation to alternative language.
If a person who is knowledgeable enough to know what a speaker will sound like from looking at the measurements can not also get across the subjective consequences of those measurements in the non-technical intersubjective ways we use to communicate all day, then he wouldn't be much of a teacher.
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