Sorry, @giova05, I cannot pick a side here. To me, the biggest complication here is the one between our ears. Right around 53 mins or so in this video, Tyl starts talking about how the brain fills in a lot of gaps in our perception when there are sudden changes to hearing aquity, and studies have shown that the brain does similarly to vision changes. The brain does all kinds of interpretive work on the incoming sensory information. For example, if you hold your hand in front of your face at about half arm’s length (so a 90 degree bend in your elbow) and then extend your arm and look at your hand roughly twice the distance away, your hand looks to be about half as large as it was in the near position. However, if you do ray tracing of the light beams incident on the retina in these two situations (that’s a measurement), the images on the retina are NOT different in size by a factor of 2. I don’t remember the exact number of size factor difference, apologies, but it’s much different than 2. The brain makes it LOOK like 2, though. So, I’m caught here. We humans understand a lot of physics behind waves and electrical signals and all that kind of stuff to measure things really well with microphones and such. While our ears share a lot of mechanical features in common with microphones, they’re connected to a thing we don’t understand well enough to fully grasp the connection between measurements and perception. What does that mean for this argument?
My answer is YES! As Tyl showed, there are some measurements that correlate with perception if one has the experience to see and understand that relationship. So, an informed consumer can look at certain measurement charts and shape their expectations for a given piece of audio equipment to a reasonable degree…but it doesn’t tell the whole story. We can measure incoming sensory information from a cold, analytical standpoint, but we can’t “measure” what our brains are doing to compare with any known standard - at least for now until the science may or may not catch up. And the thing is, both our ears AND our brains are super essential to the whole listening (or viewing) experience.
Clear as mud? ;p