Hi there. Been in the hobby for a while now, I noticed same headphones sounding better over time and a clearing perception of soundstage etc. I wonder if it is just my brain filling in the sound with imagination or what?
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The answer is probably a little bit of everything. Preference has a lot to do with it, so does aversion to change, with a little bit of boredom thrown in to boot, and sprinkled with a liberal dose of acclimation, break in, evolving tastes etc.
I don’t think you’ll be able to boil it down to any one thing, and all you have to do to prove it to yourself is to go back and listen to something you bought a year ago and hadn’t listened to in a long time, and you brain will go through all sorts of contortions as the processing process happens all over again.
I do think that our brains have a remarkable ability to listen for details as we acclimate when our headphone or system du jour becomes the new norm. How long does it take probably varies for everyone as well.
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@db_Cooper is talking about some of the ways in which pattern recognition plays a role. Human brains are excellent pattern recognizers and music is the creative assembly of sound patterns. The more you listen to any piece of gear the more your brain will acclimate and be able to pick out the sonic patterns that are unique to that piece. Once you reach a certain level of familiarity with that pattern it does not take much of a change for your brain to go “WAIT! Something’s different!” Pay attention to those subtle changes enough and try to understand how and why they’re different and your brain will literally start forming new physical connections between ideas that were not connected before - that’s what true and real learning is, btw - and in time you’ll be able to recall what those differences are and why they happen more and more quickly…and have more ideas to make more connections with - this is why the more you learn the more you can learn.
So training ears is actually brain training. Audiophile ears, or [gulp] golden ears, aren’t physiologically more capable than the broader population’s on average, it’s literally that their brains have more practice picking out sound patterns and hearing changes in those patterns.
Pattern recognition is one the foundational concepts in cognitive psychology, btw, and serves as the basis for what engineers are trying to replicate with machine learning.
And I just dropped the scientific basis for why subjective listening is important and useful. Expect the crowing from the measurement crowd in 5…4…3…2… 
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Brilliant post. I’ll do some research on the topic. This isn’t ASR so you should be safe (I hope)
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training our ears? essentially learning the definitions to all the fancy terms used to describe sound and then fooling ourselves into believing that’s what we hear.
this is only said semi-seriously 