The progress was made by both measurements and listening.
Measurements alone fail to reveal everything pertaining to sound quality of reproduction system.
BTW, how do you choose loudspeakers to you system? By price and measurements only? Or do you also listen to them?
Completely agree, all sensory perception is an illusion - a recreation in the mind of some nerve impulses that we assign meaning/pleasure to.
The second para of your answer, I agree with up to your last sentence. I would restate it "The question is how much a system gives us a pleasing illusion of an imagined event." Assigning any more significance to this illusion or trying to root it in some form of measurement "reality" is self-deception.
Sorry, all sensory perception is a re-creation an image of reality in our minds, thus, different from reality-in-itself.
To an individual, or to the public?
Many things in physics started as theories that were either proved or disproved later on by experiments. Thus, often knowledge starts in a scientists mind.
The word "pleasing" may be misleading, at least concerning some people.
For myself, the more proximity to live music there is, the more pleasing is listening to reproduced music.
To me, there is a direct correlation between the illusion of listening to live music and the illusion of listening to reproduced music.
I never said that we could dispose all measurements. All I said was that in some areas, like audio reproduction, measurement alone aren't enough - not at the present scientific knowledge.
Exactly - it's a construct of the mind! How do you know you are not listening to an illusion of your own making? There are many here who say that the McGurk effect is proof of the fallacy of sighted listening.
Perception allows the mind to create a model of reality, which for practical purposes is close enough and good enough. However, a model of reality isn't reality-in-itself. A model of reality is something that represents reality, hopefully to a good practical proximity. That model, that representation, is but a mental image in our minds.
So which is the better amplifier, the one that sounds better to you because its distortion masks other flaws in the sound system or the one that reveals them because its undistorted output accurately reproduces the input waveform?
Agreed...in such circumstances we use both toolkits and continue working to elicit those measurements that correlate with our sensory perception so that we can continue the forward progress.
I used "pleasing" purposely because it's really impossible to remember the sonics of an event - audio memory & all that. Most people go with what they find more "pleasing" to them - some like the "presence" of the music, some like the "air" around the instruments, some like the 3D soundstage, some like "euphonic", etc. It begins to boil down to taste & taste changes. As Leonard Cohen states "I don't trust my inner feelings, inner feelings come & go"
Right...but the word illusion keeps creeping in and by definition illusions are misperceptions, not proper perceptions.
All perceived reality is but a construction of the mind.
Some people like Buddha and Shankara say that Enlightenment (according to their terminology of Enlightenment) is a direct perception of reality-in-itself. In that direct perception of reality, previous perceptions are revealed as illusions created by individuals' minds.
However this is outside the realm of present day science and probably off topic.
Yet, some present physicists use terminology akin to Buddhism and Yoga.
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