It's an established idea in audiophile circles: Sound quality is all subjective. What you hear is what you hear, and nobody can tell you you're wrong. But is it true?
Dare I say it? The idea of subjective sound quality is quietly holding people back from better sound.
We don't disagree about quality. We disagree about which flaws we'll tolerate.
Here's an idea I find useful when discussing why we experience sounds systems differently, and I'll credit an industry colleague for the sharpest version of it:
We tend to think people value different things in sound. One person cares about soundstage, another about bass slam, another about vocal clarity. But that's not quite what's happening. What actually differs is which flaws each of us is willing to accept.
Bass, midrange, treble, imaging, separation, dynamic capacity, tonality, distortion. To any given listener, a problem in one of these matters more or less than a problem in another. So two people audition the same speaker, one shrugs at its weakness and the other can't unhear it. It looks like a difference in taste. It's really a difference in tolerance.
Different taste in music also plays a part. Production characteristics differ across genre and recording periods. Some flaws are more problematic than others, depending on what you typically listen to. Some flaws might even make your favorite tracks better.
But take a theoretically perfect speaker. No flaws to disagree about. The disagreement largely evaporates. There's nothing left to have different tolerances for. Most people hearing it agree it's great.
That's the crack in the "it's all subjective" wall. The closer a speaker gets to having no flaws, the more universal the response to it becomes. The better it performs across any music genre. Subjectivity is a smaller piece of the puzzle than we think. It's a consequence of imperfection. Reduce the imperfections and consensus appears.
I'm not claiming we'll ever build the perfect speaker. I'm claiming the disagreements people treat as proof that good sound is unknowable are mostly disagreements about flaws. And flaws are measurable, fixable engineering problems, not matters of opinion.
Your ears may deceive you
Two more things quietly distort how people judge sound.
You can't evaluate past your own experience. If you listen to something and find it great, that tells you it's better than what you've heard before. It does not tell you nothing better exists. It just means you haven't heard it yet. The ceiling you're sensing might be the edge of your references, not the edge of what's possible.
You're acclimated to your room. If your current system runs bass-bloated or lean, either because of the speakers, or far more often because of the room, that's the sound you've calibrated "normal" to. Put a genuinely neutral speaker system in front of you and it can initially sound wrong. Not because it is. Because you're used to something that isn't neutral, and neutral now feels unfamiliar.
Both of these are humbling, and both are reasons to be skeptical of "I know what I like" as a stopping point.
So where does that leave us?
Right back at the one thing that is genuinely yours: whether you are happy with the sound. No one gets to overrule that, and I wouldn't try.
But "I'm happy with it" and "this is as good as it gets" are different statements. The first is yours to make. The second closes a door you don't have to close. Being open to something different than what you have might be the road to even greater musical experiences. After all, that's what it's all about.
