Oh dear Matt, you have so much to learn young grasshopper. You can hear what you can measure, but you can’t measure what you can hear (tone, depth of soundstage, instrument separation, etc).
Feel free to drop by the store with your Apple device and I’ll use the Taiko for comparison purposes. I’ll let you hear the difference.
Im far too busy to argue with meter readers.
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While I appreciate your kind offer, given you are eschewing any objective evidence, your reply seems to fall in to the usual Golden Ears response. "You can't measure what I can hear!"
The Golden Ears approach to audio (where we have utter confidence in our subjective inferences over any objective verification) doesn't allow any way to find out you are wrong. After all, if I come over and compared an Apple Server to the Taiko and detected no difference, you can always claim to hear a difference. Hence you would be likely to ignore my negative result as suggesting you may have been fooling yourself as a data point and just put it down to your ears being better than mine.
As to:
You can hear what you can measure, but you can’t measure what you can hear (tone, depth of soundstage, instrument separation, etc).
That is too vague and hence misleading. We can hear *some* things that we can measure, but not all. The reason why we often invent and use measurement devices is to EXTEND beyond what our senses can detect.
I hope you have a CO2 monitor in your house! You won't be seeing X-rays any time soon, but instruments can detect those. You also can't hear certain levels of distortion that can be measured (and depending how old you are, you likely can't hear above a certain frequency response that can easily be detected with instruments).
It's very important to acknowledge that we can measure things we can not hear. Because sometimes...very rarely in high end...a company will say 'look, our product made a measurable difference' but that doesn't automatically entail it is an AUDIBLE difference.
As to things we can't measure: first of all, we certainly can tell you that if two sound files are identical and the output signal measures precisely the same you are NOT in all likelihood hearing any differences - timbre, soundstage or otherwise. Measurements matter.
Further, of course tone can be measured! It's one of the most salient characteristics of sound - the frequency response of a loudspeaker (or EQ settings etc) will reliably affect the tone. I manipulate tone and timbre of sounds all day long in my work! Further: The overtones and harmonics that distinguish instruments and their timbre are well documented and measurable!
(Ever wonder how synth designers emulate different instruments if the character of tone/timbre weren't understood in measurable terms?)
As for soundstage depth and instrument separation, there is plenty known about what measurable aspects can affect those impressions - e.g. room acoustics, speaker design, etc. (I play with soundstage depth and width all the time in my listening room, via altering the acoustics). And in terms of the actual sound source: Those very properties are manipulated all the time by people creating sound (like me) and by mixers. Tons of plug-ins, EQ, reverbs, transient shapers etc work to modulate the depth and width of imaging in a mix - all of course had to be built upon measurable, predictable sonic characteristics to even work. It's not Voodoo. (There are even tutorials from mixers on youtube explaining how you can manipulate the soundstage and depth with various tools).
When people say things like "science can't measure X" often what they really mean is "I have no idea how X is measured." It's a projection of one's ignorance in that sense. I don't know about your technical knowledge so I'm not automatically assuming this of you, but...perhaps you may have a lot to learn as well on the topics you are mentioning? ;-)
I am not, btw, claiming to be anything like a technical expert myself on all these matters. Certainly not!
But I do know enough to recognize legitimate reasons for skepticism, and when I'm seeing the type of responses that are more-of-the-same in terms of a Golden Ear type response. (Assertions and anecdote about "what people hear" without additional technical/measurable corroborative evidence, or a dismissal of the relevance of measurements to one's claim).
