A question that seem to go unanswered concerns people's perception of senses and their meaning. We have five: touch, sight, smell, taste, and sound. Most we agree upon. Fur vs. sandpaper, sharp vs. blurry, rotten egg vs. perfume, bitter vs. sweet, loud vs. soft. But when we look closer at some of technology's simulations of naturally occurring sense stimulations, like television or recorded music, there seems to be less agreement.
If you stand ten people in front of an HD television and ask them to compare what they see vs. a standard definition, I would wager ten out of ten agree the HD television looks better.
If you then take the same ten people and repeat the experiment with audio you might not get the same measure of agreement. For example, demonstrating the sonic differences between high and low resolution, or a Bose Wave Radio vs. a Sonos Connect, or between a pair of bookshelf loudspeakers and a floor standing pair, might not be so obvious to all ten.
And the question I would ask is why? Are the differences too small for most to hear? Is it a matter of training? Individual ears vs. individual eyes? It's easy to feel the difference between fur and sandpaper, though obviously the differences are stark. Why not so much between equipment differences obvious to us?
It's an interesting question.
