Once you start taking system and room interaction into account, the process of assessing (or demonstrating) equipment becomes far more complex. When stark sonic differences are so easy to hear, it’s understandable that listeners are reluctant to trade that safe, reassuring and simple indicator for something altogether more complicated and convoluted. The problem is that while you can easily hear those differences, they don’t actually tell you a lot – at least not much that’s useful if you are actually interested in understanding the relative quality and qualities of a component, or making a purchasing decision.
And therein lies the rub. You make decisions based on the available information, but the quality of that information depends on the process – the methodology – that generated it. If the sources of information – reviews, in-store demos and/or home listening – are all afflicted with the same fundamental flaw, is it any surprise that, when it comes to upgrade time, so many listeners end up making bad decisions?
Listening is a learnt skill and listening to audio systems is no different. The skill doesn’t lie in what you hear. It lies in understanding what it means. Does it matter whether the difference you hear comes from a change of component or a change of speaker position? No. Because, the individual components and individual differences don’t matter. What does matter is not whether the SYSTEM sounds different, but whether it sounds better…
