Paul, If Randi and JREF were as skeptical as you, the $million would have already flown away on pigs wings.
You have already shown you don't regard 3-D hearing as real. Can you honestly not tell the difference between sounds in front or behind you without turning your head?
MP3s are good enough for my ears. but I know audiophiles that claim to hear a big difference (and not all of them are waco nut cases). Are you going to make the claim that nobody can hear the difference between an MP3 encoded at 16kb/s and CD audio? What bit rate is required before the encoding becomes transparent?
And now you are scoffing at the idea that the ear can be trained to hear recorded 3-D sound. Have you tried putting on someone else's strong prescription glasses and walked around? Do yo recall how disorienting that was? But the person that wears those glasses regularly has learned to adapt and is no longer disoriented by the altered visual field. With casual stereo listening, you are moving around, moving your head and hearing sounds coming from 2 boxes. You are also changing material and so changing recording techniques every few minutes. If you did the same with prescription eye glasses you would never get used to any of them and would always be stumbling into walls.
Real world sound are just 2 point sources when they enter our inner ears yet we are able to interpret this in full 3-D right-left, front-back, up-down and even depth with room acoustics. Recorded stereo sound can carry the same information but will be encoded differently. Why can't we train our ears to interpret recorded stereo the same way we train our eyes to interpret distortions caused by glasses?
