Hi TNT guy,
Yep, it sure is interesting, so much so that I eventually changed my career, to research and write about this subject full-time.
But what's even more fascinating about sound reproduction is this: You said, "Isn't it amazing that everyone hears differently?"
I'd respond by pointing out that yes, everyone "hears" differently when you can see the speaker, the brand name, know its price, its physical size, etc., but once you conceal those variables behind an acoustically transparent but visually opaque screen, groups of people with normal hearing--enthusiasts, audiophiles, even random people off the street--in fact all agree on the "sound" or tonal balance of loudspeakers.
That conclusion is what emerged from more than 25 years of testing at the National Research Council (the research program was directed by Dr. Floyd Toole, scientist and psycho-acoustician), which Axiom and I participated in. Axiom still does initial anechoic and listening tests of prototypes at the NRC in Ottawa, Ontario.
We are all equipped with the same hearing mechanism--a set of ears and a brain--and when you remove psychological biases and expectations from listening tests by using double-blind comparisons, concentrating entirely on sound quality, we all tend to agree on which speakers sound "best" (most neutral and transparent) and which are worst. We may use different language or adjectives to describe errors in frequency response, but once you agree that "laid-back" means a dip in midrange response--a lack of detail in the mids--we all hear that and spot it. The correlation is so high that really excellent speakers are often ranked within tenths of points of each other. A common score of several similarly good-sounding winners in NRC listening tests was typically 7.8 or 8.0 out of a possible 10.
Regards,
