@Bucknekked – This is a tough one. There is no way to determine whether someone else hears more than you or as much as you. (It is, I believe, easier to determine if someone hears less than you and this is one of the problems. Someone smarter here once said you can’t win an argument with “I can’t hear it so it’s not there”).
Then again, there IS such a thing, I believe, as developing your hearing through practice – spending a lot of time listening and comparing and discerning among different sounds, albums, equipment etc.
So the question, sometimes, is whether a certain person can hear something, not only if it's there? Is his hearing developed enough? This is why I often don’t take my hearing as a starting point. I’ll say I can’t hear the difference between tin plate and copper cable, but, and this for me is more important, a lot of life-time experience experts say they can’t (usually these are the ones that are not trying to sell or help someone sell you, in this case, tin plate cable) and I go by them. I rely on experts because I can’t afford to give every option a listening test.
I’m satisfied when I see that both I and some experts say the same thing. I don’t think of my ears much although many of my musician friends tell me I have nothing to worry about.
Now, about the difference. As said here many times, there are a lot of differences out there, but are these improvements? It IS possible to even hear a difference on those dumb youtube clips where people “test” 45000$ equipment (or more) and change between CD and mp3, but what is that difference made of? What it consists of? It is similar with very expensive equipment. Many of those brands deliberately produce “signature-sound” equipment and of course you can hear the difference, but is this difference really relevant to you?
Since no one can own as many sound systems as there are different studios/sounds, I always believed it is best to go after the equipment that does nothing or as good as nothing to the sound except amplify it and reproduce it.
In the end, there are always those cases of exposing companies fixing their systems in order to sell audiofool sh… like Nordost and all those cases mentioned in these forums over time. To which I say If the difference is so big that it’s worth the increase of 8000$ for some piece of equipment, why the fixing? Why do you need to meddle with the source material if it’s audible?
But you see now how tough it is? How intertwined and blurred it is? Yes it is possible to hear more than the average Joe AND since it is next to impossible to determine when this stops and becomes mere placebo, you’re left only with your honesty and sense of decency. At one point audible improvements stop being improvements and become mere differences among high-end brands. Still audible, but is it worth thousands of bucks?
