The tiniest of changes

I asked in yesterday's post how the tiniest of changes can be heard through the grossest of mediums. Loudspeakers and rooms. Loudspeakers are grossly inaccurate. Phase, frequency, and linear transfer of energy are off by orders of magnitude relative to the electronics that drive them. To add insult to injury, rooms add yet another layer of distortion to the mix. How is it possible that through all these performance barriers—difficult to measure jitter levels, near perfect energy transfer, frequency response beyond human hearing—we can still detect minute changes in sound quality? It turns out we humans have amazing abilities to change our points of reference on the fly: picking out single conversations from a crowd of people, pinpointing location and timbre amidst a cacophony of distractions, recognizing vanishing low levels of added harmonics. The question of importance between sources and outputs is a circular argument based around this very important observation in today's post. Let's ruminate on its implications and pick up the discussion tomorrow.