“He can tell the difference between tube amps and transistor amps but not between lp and digital music.”
That is surprising!
> That is surprising!
Maybe not, as the same is true for me. I've lost a lot of my high-end frequencies, too much playing loud rock-n-roll in bands over the years. And I'm 67 and male, so my high-end is shot by default anyway.
As a result I can't hear the high-freq quantization noise of digital recordings (unless they're low sampling rate). But I can hear the difference in how transistors vs tubes reproduce loud sounds, since they approach their power limits differently. Transistors tend to "clip", tubes tend to "round", and it sounds quite different.
It does not entirely surprise me.
I worked with my brother years ago, building hi-fi speakers. We showed at CES two years. He could tell the difference, and I learned from him to tell the difference. But many cannot.
Personal hearing frequency response is just one factor. Cultivating an ear for sound reproduction authenticity is another factor.
I am now a semi-professional chorister. I had to cultivate an ear for harmony, timbre, et cetera. At first, I could not tell anything (except, I like it, or, I don’t like it.)
In contrast, my first teacher, who trained with one of the most famous choral conductors in the world in the past forty years, cannot tell the difference between true hi-fi and so-so-fi.
Her organic hearing is actually better than mine: no shooting, no airplanes.
She never cultivated an ear for hi-fi. But she grew up listening to Classical Music, and got a degree in Music. She can pick out one voice from a full choir in the moment, and correct the singer’s pitch, volume, timbre, pronunciation, et cetera - it is quite remarkable. (That is how I learned to sing harmony: She gave me instant feedback.)
But she cannot easily tell the audiophilic difference in sound reproduction between different sources. It used to drive me nuts. I would stage demonstrations to show her, and she would just shrug with a shamed face, and say they did not sound much different to her.
She was listening to the MUSIC, not to the SOUND.