An interesting demonstration

There are just as many if not more factors that make up a great audio performance, timbre, location, size, dimensionality, detail, dynamics, focus. Both your system and the source have to provide all of that and you have to pay attention to all of it. As a mental exercise can you do it all at once? I certainly can not. 

nonoise, you are making it far more complicated than it actually is. Why? Personal bias perhaps.

That was my point. Are we now down to "I'm rubber, you're glue" school of argument?


All the best,
Nonoise

When I was learning to listen critically last year, someone (Darko?) suggested listening not only with focused attention, but to do a crossword puzzle (e.g.) while listening. Almost a "peripheral vision" kind of move.

Wow! thanks Hilde...

Very important observation...

The great biologist Wolfgang Schad wrote a book about Peripheral Seeing and his importance to identify form and function in nature...

The neuro psychiatrist writer Iain McGilchrist in " the Master and his emissary", a seminal book, distinguish TWO modes of attention, linked to TWO way to be in the world..."Peripheral attenton" and "focused attention"..

For sure we use these 2 modes at the same times ....

With the important fact that some people are more focused on details and other to the larger context....I cannot do anything than simplifying a 500 hundred pages book here...

To complete your example of the museum...

When we look "peripherally" we could become being conscious of the environment and the link to our own body could be thought on another level completely...

The inside of our body is a vast  world which could be related to the vast world  outside of the body by a  new geometry for example...This geometry exist by the way....I cannot describe it here in this post...

Then instead to think about an object in front of a body we may think about a " function" manifested simultaneously in 2 interrelated communicating  worlds....

Then Focus attention and Peripheral attention plays TOGETHER in an evolutive perceptive process...

As a mental exercise can you do it all at once? I certainly can not.

Nobody can do it all at once ...But the point is the ability to do it is there not all at once but in an ongoing process...

I can't do it at once. I move through the various modes.
Thanks, Mahgister. Interesting ideas, there.
I think the hifi podcast guys, Darren and Duncan, also remarked on how you can tell a room/gear setup sounds good from out in the hallway. That's an interesting indicator of how sensitive we are.