Ah, guys 'n gals, please don't fight.
The term golden ears is used in another sense than usually meant in the 'flame war' (as coined in this thread). There's differences no one can hear, simply because they are outside the human hearing spectrum, or because they don't exist. Golden ears will never change a thing about that. In that sense they don't exist, never will and have been 'put to bed' decades ago by any serious scientist or professional engineer.
Then there's the statement that hearing acuity has recently been found to be non-linear in the frequency and time domain, in contrast to what was previously thought to be true (amplitude domain only). This opens new possibilities for DSP, e.g. aiding spatial perception by improving algorithms on presently used surround, ambisonics and holophony decoders. Just like better understanding of psycho-acoustics has facilitated algorithms for the Mp3 format and, later, Mp3HD.
The fact training improves perception is no surprise, but in fact a 'side-topic' in addition to the issue of acuity of our physical capacities. That these capacities are not always used to the fullest of their potential has to do with training, that they exist in the first place has to do with boundaries of physical human hearing- and sound processing 'systems'.
So the article is just stating these physical capacities are more refined than previously believed. Stuff turns out to be more complex then initially assumed, hey, sounds reasonable to me, isn't that the story of our lives? If one trains these capacities then, as with all training, the brain will assign more cells to the task, thereby improving ones use of existing capacities. The firmware is updated, more fully employing the hardware, as it were, and thus improves our hearing systems output: our brains CPU receives information at a higher bit rate, making reconstruction of real world sound waves by our inner signal processor more accurate.
People who have tasted and smelled hundreds of thousands of different wines, are able to quite accurately identify grapes, heritage and geographic origin of a specific wine. People who have listened to classical music all their lives are better able to distinguish flaws in the musicians' performance, live or recorded. No debate, these peoples firmware has been updated, now able to process information at a higher bit rate. In that sense, golden ears have always existed and always will.
No flame war necessary, would my conclusion be.
Cheers everyone.
