Concentration


I believe to get the best experience with your stereo you have to give your full attention to the music (not the sound.)  Reading, doing chores, or writing something (like I’m doing right now) really lessens your enjoyment and can potentially cause you to doubt the quality of your system.  
What do you think?

rvpiano

The idea of the prismatic mode of listening so apt, I listen in all modes @hilde45 mentioned. 

 

What has become most salient to me over decades of building systems and optimizing and improving them is a growing preference for more complex music played with acoustic instruments. As one's system improves much easier to follow complex and densely recorded lines, you get to finally hear much of the low level info that you may have missed in the past. And acoustic instruments have a 'natural' timbre  which allows one comparison to a 'live' instrument. And so it seems the quality or qualities of our systems may impact our choices of music we choose to listen to. I continue to listen to many other genres and more simplistic, less complex music in which sound doesn't play as big a role, perhaps nostalgia, other emotions come into play. And all this can be seamless for me, with streaming I can play exclusively within a genre or randomly play from all genres, this all a single cut from an album. With random play I can go from lets say a classical cut to a honky tonk cut, listening modes may change quite drastically from cut to cut. I just let it be and let the music take me in whatever direction the robot chooses, amazing experience to let someone or something take over the CHORE of choosing which music to listen to. I'm just along for the ride!

 

Am I the only one that does this? The title of this thread mentions concentration, for me the above mode of listening requires the LEAST concentration. Back in the bad old days I remember having to look through multi thousand cd, vinyl collections, later on streaming library in order to find exactly what I thought I might want to listen to. I might spend 15 minutes deciding on some album, cd to play, that was not seamless listening for me, far too much concentration.

Yes, I agree. Another gratifying  form of listening is letting the music just drift over you.  It’s a different form of enjoyment from intense listening.

@rvpiano  I think this "concentration" is a good part of the reason why many say that vinyl sounds better than digital. I'm included in that lot, but my analog system is much superior and should sound better. But vinyl, by its very nature, causes us to pay more attention since music must be dealt with every 20 minutes. IOW it makes us pay attention much closer than digital. Just a thought.

 

Music has nothing to do with sound quality...( But yes sound quality matter for me as for you)

As any musician know...

 

 Jazz or Persian music or classisal or Indian music are all different experience asking something from us:  our attention...

 We concentrate on something we already knew by our attention focus habit...

We dont concentrate on the "unknown" from which our attention focus deviate ( it is not my taste or my habit)...

 The quality of our attention  determine the quality of our concentration in a feed back loop...

To increase our attention  we must expose ourselves to different music from different cultures...

Then our concentration will increase...

There is no concentration  when we listen always the same genre only a body robotic response...

 

 

«Taste is a mistress not a teacher»--Groucho Marxcool

 

 

@audphile1 yeah, but we know you know all the words to "WAP", and that you can never stir a pot of macaroni the same way ever again.