Learning to Listen: Neurological Evidence

asctim-

Both recordings sound great and highly enjoyable on both the speakers and the headphones, so I’d say this level of refinement is beyond my typical threshold of concern. But it is interesting and a good example for comparison.

Which is why I mention it. The Well is much more liquid, lush, deep and luxurious than FBRC. Not even close. This is all entirely separate and apart from frequency response. If people are distracted and misled by frequency, well that is another one to learn to distinguish!

One way to do that, frequency response will not change as things warm up, while grain definitely will. In order to distinguish the difference it helps to think about the fundamental tone or frequency. Grain is never there in nature but rather is added in the recording/playback chain. As grain goes away the fundamental tone remains. But since grain is as Harley says primarily midrange/treble those regions can seem at first to be toned down a bit. Because in removing grain we are removing something that was added. This is where learning to distinguish between the fundamental that is really there and the grain that is added comes in. Once you learn to do this it becomes clear grain may be evident in that frequency range, but still frequency response and grain are two very different things.

There are also different versions of both these fine recordings. Both FBRC and The Well are available on 33 and 45. In both cases the 45 is easily the more detailed and yet also more natural and smooth. The 33 versions sound great until compared with 45, after which they seem a bit hard.

I find that claim pretty unbelievable.
Do you have a link?

Lord, help me. The bit in blue. At the top of the page. Yeah that bit, looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuSGN8yVrcU&t=1340s
Which is even cued up so you don't have to wait long to hear:

“Selectively changing what we’re listening to in response to the content. Literally reaching out to listen for things.”

Unbelievable. Indeed. Something sure is.

Interesting. So you say. You and others. And yet many times I have mentioned specific and easy methods to do this and learn. I have yet to see anyone try them. Instead what happens is people change the subject. Kind of like the way I post about a neurological basis for learning to listen for new characteristics and the usual suspects do their level best to talk about anything but.

hilde45-

At some odds with your very valid point is that there are musicians who often don’t have very good systems or care very much about sound quality in audio systems. That may merely be because they just don’t care about audio quality sound -- which would be weird -- or that they listen in some other way. But the notion that if one is a musician they already know how to listen as an audiophile is contradicted in a lot of cases, and that presents a puzzle. 

Musicians do indeed listen differently. For myself, having spent more than a decade practicing music this is pretty obvious. Starting from learning piano at about 8 years old (third grade I think) I went to accordion through grade school (parents, not my idea let me assure you!) and then played french horn all through jr high and high school.  

Musicians listen primarily for pitch, because nothing sounds worse than being out of tune. Almost anything can sound good, some jazz chords are deliberately jumbled, and you can bend notes all day long, but out of tune pretty much always sounds bad. So musicians develop a keen awareness for pitch. Vibrato brings life and soul, so musicians are also good at dynamics.   

Timing, now we start to get into words that mean one thing to us but something completely different to the musician. Sinatra has exquisite timing. Knows just when to start a note, as well as when and how to end it. Timing for audiophiles is completely different. Our systems are not performing Sinatra, the performance is done. We are reproducing it. The timing we hear is completely different. Audiophiles throw these words around all the time. Not having studied music they have no idea how radically different the meaning changes depending on the context.  

Stereophile had a series of feature articles about this many years ago, back in the 90's I think it was. The angle was the tired cliche, the same old same old being bandied about here. Never really getting at the heart of it, that making music and reproducing music are quite different skill sets.

MC,

Jennifer Warnes ’Famous Blue Raincoat" and "The Well" both sounds lucious and liquid on my rig. Know this cuzz I have both serial numbered box sets.

Maybe your system???

Since it is easy to hear the difference on mine, but they both sound the same on yours, you figure out which is transparent and which makes everything sound the same.

What you are asking is at the root of the Learning to Listen discussions: How do you learn to hear something you don’t yet know how to hear?

The first two were direct and to the point. Whatever it is you are able to hear today, there was a time when you were not. How did this happen?

With me, the words were there. Robert Harley has a great book where he talks about all these different terms. The smoothness of a sound lies somewhere along a continuum. Etch is harshest, then grain which can be coarse or fine, then as it gets smoother pristine, then liquid, and the liquid can be excellent clear water or go too far and be syrupy.

Anyone can hear these things, it is simply a question of learning. This discussion starts off with a video where we see the actual bio-neural pathways by which such learning happens. The question still remains, Why? How?

“Selectively changing what we’re listening to in response to the content. Literally reaching out to listen for things.”

That quote is from the video. He gives the example of the flute, but it could be anything. Note another time he talks about cells that respond very fast to transients. Very different from the ones we typically test hearing with. Those cells sense tones at different frequencies. We have way more hearing ability than just crude frequency. We can do way more than just pick out the flute.

Your question sounds exactly like where I was 30 years ago. You know all these terms, but where are they in the music? How do you learn to identify them? That is the big mystery.

Sorry we have to keep closing these threads. The one or two serious comments like yours and hilde45 get crowded out and worse. One so bad I had the mods remove it. The other one is closed but still there for viewing. Anyone seriously interested in the subject I would suggest it is worth the time to read, because you are not alone. Others have had these same revelations, epiphany, whatever you want to call it. When it happens it happens.

This video gives us the mechanism to understand some of it. When you decide to listen for something, anything (the flute) neural impulses physically alter the hearing mechanism to help make that happen. But you have to know what it is, you have to have something in mind. Which until you hear it and know you’ve heard it, how do you do that?

If you want to learn to pick out grainy vs smooth, well that is part of the burn-in process. Pretty sure you have already heard it. Just didn’t recognize that aspect of it. Tubes tend to be smoother, ss grainier. CD always grain compared to LP. Doug Sax mastered recordings are all liquid smooth. Ditto Sheffield.

Jennifer Warnes The Well, mixed by George Massenburg and mastered by Bernie Grundman is a lovely luxuriously liquid recording compared to Famous Blue Raincoat which is not grainy other than in comparison. That is one of the many things that makes this so hard. None of these things are objective absolutes. They are all subjectively relative. That is also what makes it so gratifying when you get it.

hilde45-

OP, thank you so much for this post. Adding it to my library and will learn from this. FYI, I've been having a back and forth with Ethan Winer and he keeps *insisting* that if his list of measurements show no difference between cables, then anything perceived is either part of a scam or placebo. Everyone who claims to hear a difference, he says, is a dupe or a shill. Everyone. I keep telling him that because the brain/perceptual systems are so complex, that he should not be so sure that he has the final word on what/how to measure for -- that he has to consider the complicated listener-perceiver side of the equation. He's a hedgehog; he won't budge. Ethan aside, this area of research is fascinating. Thank you for sharing this. If you ever find more, please share or DM me.

Will do. Thanks.

It was listening to the XLO Test CD track Poor Boy that triggered my awareness, of what I was hearing from some of the better CD players and amps. They were less etched and grainy than mine, but it took playing this all analog recording to make the connection.