What other examples can a person hear but cannot measure? Here are some examples which hopefully you can recreate at home:
Image Height
This is the easiest to demonstrate.
Have you ever played some music and notice some sounds are projected from very high up? Effectively fooling you into thinking the sound originated from somewhere in the ceilings. a location that appears to be far from the speaker source. An example is like hearing raindrops hitting a tin roof.
If you do not have a track that can demonstrate this effect, go out (or go to the Internet) and grab the album “Beyond Skin” by Nitin Sawhney. The sound track “The Pilgrim” is one of the best examples I’m aware of when demonstrating image height.
Image Clarity
Have you ever noticed sometimes when you swap out a power cable, or a interconnect, even a USB cable, and you suddenly realise the sound you hear seems to be a bit clearer than before? In a way this is is like putting on prescription glasses and suddenly you are getting clearer vision now - only this is like putting on something for the ear.
Clarity is something that is on my mind right now because of the addition of the Accuphase DC-37. After hearing mainly DSD and high reso (96 kHz or better) material, when I go back to redbook (44.1 kHz) the latter just seems to lack clarity now. In a way this is like looking at a 1080P picture for a while and then realise 576i video is very fuzzy now. The good thing is about a few short minutes of adjustment period that sensation is gone as I have retuned myself to what it is.
How do you measure image height and audio clarity? There are more metrics that are audible - sound stage width, image depth, timbre of various instruments, 3D sound localisation. How do you measure any of them?
Nobody can argue these are not audible effects, and yet none of these are measurable. There is a good reason for that.
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