Ears work well for confirmation and are the point of the whole exercise. However, when one is tuning things they are pretty close to useless for fine tuning because the differences are going to be subtle and not readily perceivable in a few seconds. Often it takes days and many trials to confirm progress or decide to regroup.
If the theory for sonic improvement for some tweak is reduction of EMI then this can be readily confirmed or denied by monitoring the EMI. If it is confirmed one will then have a narrowed space to search through and hence the need to fine tune things by ear. Or if the tweak proves not to have affected EMI (and one has tried a plausible number of frequency bands) then one might focus elsewhere.
When setting up new speakers in my room I went around in circles for several weeks trying to get the low and mid bass to sound right. This was pretty frustrating because it involved crawling around on the floor and tweaking the sub and then moving back to the listening position and playing music. I spent $200 on a measurement microphone and real time analyzer and figured out what was going on the very next day, and a day later had the bass dialed in, with only one or two additional trials by ear. On the other hand, when dialing in the high frequencies there was no need for any measurement, it was obvious once the bass had been sorted out. Here the issue was to figure out how bright a given recording was supposed to sound, since these varied all over the lot. This means doing things by ear, but this was the easy part of the setup.
Best results involve a careful balance of measurement and listening. I learned this over 50 years ago when tweaking a Dyanco amplifier by changing components in the feedback loop.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Edits: 04/18/12
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