auditioning sessions vs. listening sessions

A professional musician has a similar problem - we must make these kinds of distinctions all of the time. If I am listening to a recording of myself in particular, it becomes nearly impossible to keep these two kinds of listening separate. The term most of us use for the first kind of session you describe would be "criticial" listening. For those of us who are always performing, we must learn to do both kinds of listening simultaneously, but this is no easy task. Generally speaking, the first time I hear something, it is almost impossible not to listen critically. But it is certainly possible, and even essential to maintain sanity to be able to turn off the critical listening and just enjoy the music. Those of us who play full-time in symphony orchestras all have certain pieces that we find very hard to enjoy listening to because we have to play them so often at work - the Nutcracker springs to mind for me immediately, the Pachelbel Canon would be another one for many, as would the Messiah. What I do to try to keep these pieces of music somewhat fresh is never listen to them outside of work. You certainly won't find a recording of the Nutcracker in my record collection.

That said, I always encourage non-musicians (I hate that term, actually) to develop their ears, as this kind of understanding will always enhance their enjoyment of all types of music, and this definitely involves critical listening. So it is not necessarily desirable to always keep both kinds of sessions separate. The more you listen critically, the more you will learn about the music you are listening to, and the more enjoyment you will receive from it when not listening critically. I have trained many people's ears, and not once has any of them come back to me and complained that they didn't enjoy listening as much anymore. To be more specific for audiophiles, I would say that doing more critical listening in general will also increase your ability to determine what kinds of traits you like in the equipment you are auditioning. One shouldn't become obsessive about it and forget to enjoy the music at all, but it is great fun to listen to the same recording on different pieces of equipment, or different pressings of the same recording on the same piece of equipment, and many of us who are professionals do this all the time, both for study and for pleasure. The more you know about what is going on, the more things you have to take enjoyment from.

Listening to music I love always quickly turns into a 'listening' session.

Listening to music that doesn't really move me most always turns into an 'audition' experience. I find myself listening more to the sonics than musical content.

For that reason I never use music I love for auditioning equipment. I rarely use 'audiophile recordings' either because I have a tendency to attribute the 'recording technique's excellence to the reproductive qualities of the equipment.

So my questions are: can one make this kind of a distinction? Is it desirable to keep these two kinds of sessions separate?

Nearly impossible to separate except if you listen to just a one or two instruments alone or concentrate on lead guitar lead vocalist. If you read up on "masking" then you will realize that what we hear is highly dependent on the balance of the frequencies heard and their precise timing.

Once you have a complex orchestral piece or an 11 piece jazz band then the quality of the system will often affect the presentation to such a degree that you cannot separate the two. Lead guitar and often lead vocalist is easy enough to evaluate on any system. However, at a deeper level, even simple things like decent bass response (very expensive to get accurate bass) may affect your ability to clearly distinguish bass guitar notes from kick drum.

Basically anywhere that two instruments interplay and share a fair amount of frequencies then it becomes system dependent - tuba/baritone sax, bassoon, double bass...in fact many instruments that form the rhythmical foundation of music require a system with good accurate bass. IMHO, the typical one note ported speaker with oodles of harmonic distortion coupled with typical room modal issues can make the critical listening task very difficult - right up to the lower mid range.

Midrange can also be a problem if it is "scooped" or laid back - as most 'accents' in music require a good forward midrange in order to correctly hear the emphasis from the musician. For example David Garibaldi is very well known for playing at several levels - this complex method of accenting drums (different from your rock n' roll back beat) is all too easily lost on a "scooped" mid range speaker.

Another issue is driver integration across a crossover - often a problem with speakers that have a crossover close to 1000 Hz (a critical listening frequency). Finally, impulse response is absolutely critical too...a speaker or amplifier that has odd ringing or resonance will cause masking too (in the same way a poor bass response does)

Yes, they are completely separate things. I call one listening to the stereo, the other listening to music. I find it best to decide beforehand which I am going to do. I try not to use favorite music for listening to the stereo, so I don't get sick of it. I am trying to select a variety of auditioning songs that have different qualities (i.e deep punchy bass, spaciousness, male & female vocals, symphonies, etc) that I like enough to listen to repeatedly, but not so much that when I get sick of them, I'll have lost a source of great musical enjoyment.
TwoLeftEars - great username!!

Thanks to all for these thoughtful responses!

Learsfool--perhaps I need to introduce more categories, adding the qualifiers critical and non-critical to both "auditioning" (listening to the stereo) and "listening" (listening to the music). But I doubt that non-critical auditioning ever occurs, so perhaps we're down to three.

(1) Auditioning for me is when you're listening to the equipment, or the purely technical aspects of the music software (e.g. tape hiss, dynamic range, etc.). The music in this case is merely the vehicle that allows you to make judgements about the hardware.

(Wine analogy: if you're drinking wine then the wine is the main point of interest and the goal, but to test a new glass and see how it works, you need to put some wine in it, at which point the focus shifts to the size of the opening, the shape and how well it swirls round the liquid, etc.)

(2) Critical listening for me would be when one's particularly attentive to the shape / form / structure / style / etc. of the musical composition and/or of the performance. One might listen critically to a new composition (to see if it's any good), and certainly to different performances of the same work, or to soloists, etc., to home in on aspects of their playing: timing, phrasing, bowing, intonation, etc.

(3) Emphathetic listening (non-critical listening, but not "background" listening) would be more when one's trying more to enter into the spirit of the music, enjoy it for what it is, to connect with it more, well..., emphathetically.

Obviously these aren't hard-and-fast categories, and they certainly aren't mutually exclusive. I'm just trying to pin down tendencies or emphases. I would say that (2) and (3) are equally "attentive", but (2) is more "critical" than (3), in the sense that different sets of faculties are emphasized in each case (intellec vs. emotion). Again, I recognize the limitations of this description (as in what happens, say, when one listens to a Bach fugue). Anyway, this FWIW.