Is it “mices” or “mikes?”
It’s "mics". But you could be forgiven for "mikes". Mices on the other had is bad grammar for multiple rodents.
This seems to be a skill, like juggling, which one could learn with a little knowledge and a little practice. Some of the super listeners have said as much.
It is. And right, I have.
There’s many different ways to learn but if you think "just listen a lot" will get you there sorry, no way Jose. Will "just play catch a lot" make you a better baseball player? If you want to learn basketball, will, "just dribble a lot" be good advice? I don’t think so. Skills are skills. Skills involve technique. You learn the techniques, you practice the techniques, you develop the skill. Like that with everything.
It all starts with language. Give you a very apt example. Everyone thinks they know how to drive. One of the bigger obstacles I faced as a PCA Driving Instructor, everyone comes in with 20+ years driving experience thinking they already are a "good driver". Just like in audio, everybody been hearing all their life, everyone believes they are a "good listener".
With cars we teach the late apex line. Wait, what? Yeah. See what I mean? Bob Bondurant, you probably heard of him, most famous performance driving guru on the planet, says performance driving is all about controlling weight transfer in order to maximize the traction available for the functions of braking, cornering and accelerating. Wait- what? Did they tell you any of this at any point in getting your "driver’s license"? Of course not. You haven’t the foggiest idea how to drive. Just like right now you haven’t the foggiest idea how to listen.
At least you know that much. Which is a good place to start. Highly recommend Robert Harley’s The Complete Guide to High End Audio. There’s a whole chapter on listening skills, what they are, how to develop them. It starts with language. There is a whole glossary of terms. Lots of guys think this is BS, but you can tell the great listeners from the wanna-bees just by the way they describe things. The great listeners say they heard greater image focus, less grain and glare, a more liquid top end, etc. The others fall back on variations of, "better" or "I like" without ever saying why they like. What exactly? Don’t know.
This is where a lot of the double-blind bias BS comes from. People who never learned to listen cannot hear anything there and so presume there really is nothing there. Prove it to me! They say. Learn to listen, you won’t need anyone to prove anything. You will know.
A little knowledge goes a long way, but to be really good will take a lot more than a little practice. When I started back around 1990 it took me a good 3 to 6 months driving around listening to things to be able to hear the difference between two DACs or CDPs. Most times I heard no difference at all. Sometimes one sounded better than another, but I couldn’t say why. One day listening to a CD at home I heard the sound and something clicked and from that moment on my skills improved by leaps and bounds.
The difference was I had learned there are a lot more different qualities to sound than just volume. When people talk about tone they really are talking about volume. Frequency response is volume. If the volume is equal at every frequency then we say it is flat. But all we mean is everything is the same volume. Volume is nothing more than one thing being louder than another. Pretty rudimentary. This is where most of us start. But now that you understand this, look around, see how many are still on this first bottom rung of sound quality.
One of the few store salesmen to actually help me with this said listen to the cymbals, the way they tail off. First I noticed yes, the DAC he said was better the cymbals did tail off longer. Then I noticed something else. With one they made a sound like "tssss" with the better one it was more like "tsingggggggg". The attack was better, the sizzle was less strident, there was more body or ring to it, and it faded and tailed off longer into nothingness. Also the nothingness it tailed off into was blacker and quieter.
All these things from just this one sound. That is how you get to be a better listener. Not by listening but by thinking, examining, evaluating, comparing, and putting into words all the tiny little differences you are hearing. You can listen for hours and hours and hours and if that is all you do, just sit there and listen, it will get you nowhere. To be good you need to learn and practice the techniques. Harley’s book is the best way I know to get started.