11Top makes a good point.
I had an interesting experience over the past few days. Waves came out with a plugin designed to solve some of the problems that occur when mixing music on headphones, using their NX system as the basis for it. As you know, with headphones the ears are isolated from each other, but in a room you get all kinds of reflections, and each ear hears a bit of what the other ear hears. The software attempts to give you what you’d hear in one of Abbey Road’s mix rooms.
Whether it accomplishes this I can’t say, because I haven’t mixed there, though I have mixed in similar rooms. It’s probably different from the room, but it does ameliorate some of the problems with headphones, and I’ll get some use out of it as a double-check for mixes. But to further what 11Top says:
As part of the process, you input the measurements of the circumference of your head, and the rear measurement of the distance between your ears, measured with a cloth measuring tape.
If you play around with this, you discover that differences in head measurements make tiny, but audible, differences. We know that everyone’s ears are shaped a little differently. And of course, it’s not just what goes into the ears, the brain processes all of the data it picks up, so perceived sound is psychoacoustic.
Since none of our heads, ears, or brains are exactly alike, I think it’s probable that we can listen to the same thing, but come away with different perceptions.
Another factor is what we listen for. Most musicians have the experience of concentrating on, say, a guitar part on a recording to learn it. Our brains can focus on the part and more or less tune out the other instruments a bit. This is also the case in evaluating audio gear, like amplifiers; we can listen for different things, and even if we hear the same audio data, come away with different impressions.
As an example, one of the things I listen for with guitar amps is what I’ll call ‘complexity’ for lack of a better word; you might call it how the amp generates harmonics (since harmonic distortion is what guitar amps create when hit with a signal). Every amp does this a little differently. Another is how quickly the amp compresses the signal (I use compressors in the studio all the time, so this kind of response hits my ear pretty strongly). Anyway, these and a zillion other differences help us distinguish between amps.
Bottom line is that some of these things that I listen for aren’t necessarily the things you listen for. So I can be bugged by certain types of amps, while you might love them for the very things that bug me.
Conclusion: we hear differently; we listen for different things; and we value those things we hear in different ways.
This is true of music we listen to, hi fi equipment we buy, guitar amps, guitars, pickups and all kinds of other stuff. So if I say a modeler doesn’t really sound like a guitar amp, I’m really only talking about the things I listen for, and the things someone else listens for may be way different.
I say this a lot: there is no ‘best’, there’s only what’s best for you.
