Listening Skills Part Duex: What are you listening for?


Had a few experiences lately that together were a stark reminder of something known for a long time, because I lived it myself.  

In the beginning, or at any rate going back to about 1991, I was unable to hear any difference between different CD players and DACs. Even some amplifiers, they might not sound exactly the same but I was hard pressed to say why.   

This went on for a long time. Months. Many months. Like okay a year. Whatever. During which time I was driving around hitting all the Seattle/Portland area stores listening to everything I could find. About the only difference big enough to be sure of was receivers. They for sure are crap. But even there it was hard to say exactly in what way. Just the difference there was glaring enough it was obvious this is not the way to go. But that was about it.    

All during this time of course I was reading Stereophile and studying all the reviews and building up a vocabulary of audiophile terms. The problem, seen clearly as usual only in the rear view mirror, was not really being able to match up the terminology with what I was hearing. I had words, and sounds, but without meaning, having no real link or connection between them.   

One day after yet another frustrating trip to Definitive I came home and put on my XLO Test CD and was listening to the Michael Ruff track Poor Boy when it hit me, THIS IS THAT SOUND!!!  

What sound? Good question! The better high end gear is more full and round and liquid and less etched or grainy. Poor Boy is Sheffield, all tube, and so even though being played from CD through my grainy etched mid-fi the tubey magic came through enough to trigger the elusive connection. THIS is "that sound"!  

Once triggered, this realization grew and spread real fast. In no time at all it became easy to hear differences between all kinds of things. "No time at all" was probably months, but seemed like no time at all compared to how long I was going nowhere.  

What happened? There are a near infinite number of different sonic characteristics. Attack and decay, fundamental tone, harmonic, and timbre, those were a few of the early ones I was able to get a handle on- but the list goes on and on.   

Just to go by experience, reading reviews, and talking to other audiophiles it would seem most of us spend an awful lot of time concentrating real hard on our own little list of these terms. We have our personal audiophile checklist and dutifully run down the list. The list has its uses but no matter how extensive the list becomes it always remains a tiny little blip on the infinite list of all there is.   

So what brought this to mind is recently a couple guys, several in fact, heard some of the coolest most impressive stuff I know and said....meh. Not hearing it.   

This is not a case of they prefer something else. This is not hearing any difference whatsoever. At all. None. Nada. Zip. 

Like me, back in the day, with CD.  

These are not noobs either. We're talking serious, seasoned, experienced audiophiles here. 

I'm not even sure it comes down to what they are listening for. Like me in '91, hard to know what you're listening for until you know what you're listening for.   

Which comes first?
128x128millercarbon
sure we get it. If you ever left self described Mecca you might discover the live vs. tape adventures at Bottlehead..just across the salty pond. Short of running a recording studio and a mobile recording rack, that experience is a phd.
My expectations as to reproduced sound have been heightened by improvements in various areas of equipment over the last 40 plus years, and my focus in listening has evolved in part due to that, as well as to exposure, experience and familiarity with the sound of actual instruments.
Although I have formal music training both with respect to composition/arrangement and with performance on certain instruments, very little of that training has a bearing on what I listen for from a reproduction system apart from the sound of real instruments (something one without training can experience simply as a regular listener in a club or venue).
I always started with the midrange-- it has to be clear and coherent- no grain or other artifacts of reproduction machinery. I started to learn how to listen to hi-fi more seriously when I got my first pair of Quads (aka the ’57’) in around 1973. But, I want it all and Quads simply cannot do that, despite providing an open window in the mids if you are positioned correctly. (yeah, I know).

Tone- sure. Timing, decay, etc.And I want to hear bass that sounds like the instruments, whether piano, double bass that sounds like a fleshed out instrument in three D space. I expect to hear whatever ambience is part of the recording.

Soundstage, which is often considered key to the listening experience should be a given-- either in recreating in scale, a portrait of the room where the recording took place, or bringing that guitar into your room.
I don’t listen loud but dynamics obviously count even at nominal volume.
A lot of the above takes us back to the source material.
But as I parse all of those audiophile attributes, I think something important is lost in the dissection. Some of this may be due to the nature of the music (I know, one shouldn’t build a system based on a preferred genre) and some may come down to the preferences or priorities of the user/listener/system designer.
There are so many ways to solve this, based on room, different equipment, type of source format and budget, that one wonders whether they are simply describing their preferred sound. And even if that isn’t the case, we are trying to describe in words something in a different dimension; one that is not only sensory, but brings with it an emotional charge if the listener is connecting with the music and the equipment isn’t getting in the way. (That may simply be a choice of music issue too).
I could probably enjoy listening to an ancient cello recording over a pre-war field coil driver and "get" an enormous amount from that presentation but that wouldn’t address the myriad other music that would require far more in the way of equipment, power handling and dynamics.
If we are engaging in this exercise, we should have an eye toward the availability and cost of the equipment and associated paraphernalia to implement it. I know when people ask for a gear recommendation a couple things happen: folks offer gear priced in the stratosphere without regard to the potential buyer’s budget; and further, folks tend to tout what they own and like. Neither is bad, it’s all information, but short of playing "guru" and essentially picking out a system for someone else, I think most of us learned through our own experimentation and access to others’ systems where we could hear things. A dealer showroom is not necessarily the best environment to listen, at least for evaluation purposes, and if solely for learning is usually not that meaningful.
Seat time is important, but not just in a room with a hi-fi; rather, in a room with instruments being played.
I realize despite however long I’ve been at this pursuit, I haven’t really churned equipment. Nor have I done a huge amount of "tweaking" other than isolation, bass traps, good power and becoming a very picky consumer of tubes. I have, however, become a passionate student of music that I never previously listened to and that brings me great joy. I am fascinated by the history, the technology of the period, the method of recording and all of the other things that give greater understanding to where the performance and players fit into some larger continuum.
Perhaps, with age, our priorities change too. I’m not quite at the whim of the nurse to play Slim Whitman, but I think as my high frequency sensitivity has diminished with age, my ability to assess the overall coherence of a reproduction system has remained, possibly as an element of judgment. I dunno.
I’ll say there is no "one way" and I avoid any sort of advice from on high- eschewing guruism; I’ve learned an enormous amount from folks that make few audiophile pretensions, but know their fields and can teach me something. Otherwise, we are all just passing through.
I’m relieved that it’s never been so hard for me to enjoy music regardless of the gear, my age, experience or listening "goals". Listening to music should simply be a joy...not something you have to train for. The ability for someone to hear something or not has no correlation whatsoever to the level of enjoyment they can derive from music.

btw - it's spelled deux....not duex
Lots of talk about all the same stuff as usual. For a bunch who acts so sure they get it the absence of anyone talking about how they learned to recognize new and unfamiliar sound characteristics is passing strange.

The last thread was closed when it went far off topic. Please try and stay on topic. You say you get it. Pony up.

How do you learn to recognize new characteristics?

Tell ya what. Let’s pretend there are none. Let’s pretend you are the all seeing all hearing guru. Okay. Were you always thus? Right out of the womb, was it? Or was there a learning process? If so, what was it?