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Listener fatigue: what does it really mean?

Okay, so I used to think that listener fatigue meant that your ears just kind of got tired from listening to speakers that were overly bright. I don't have a good understanding of the make up of an ear, but I believe there are muscles in an ear that, I guess, expand and contract while we listen to music and I figured that's what it meant to have listener fatigue. Now, I'm thinking that listener fatigue is maybe more than your ears just getting tired but actually, your whole body getting tired and feeling drained. I experienced this time and time again listening to my paradigm studio's. They are somewhat bright and provide quite a bit of detail in my oppinion, so I'm wondering if, since there was such a great amount of detail coming through, that it was physically draining because I'm sitting there analyzing everything that's coming through the speakers. I would wake up and first thing in the morning, grab a cup of coffee and start listening to music (my daily routine) and 20-30 minutes later start nodding off and I couldn't figure out what was going on. I've been sitting here this morning listening to my new vandersteen's for two hours and can't get enough. I feel like I could listen all day and that I'm almost energized from listening vs. drained.

Soooo, what are your oppinions about what listener fatigue is and why it's caused?
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Showing 6 responses by learsfool

learsfool
1,215 posts
 
I would second Brauser's suggestion that you may simply have the volume up too high. A great many audiophiles love to listen at a very high volume level, which will definitely lead to listening fatigue much quicker than listening at reasonable levels. I posted a thread several months back about volume levels and hearing loss, you might want to search for that under my moniker and check it out.
learsfool
1,215 posts
 
I also agree with Mihorn - loud volume itself has a physical impact on the listener. I experience it every day on stage at work, though it does help somehow to be causing some of it as well, blowing back at it, if you will. This is definitely a contributing factor to listener fatigue, if one plays one's home system too loudly.
learsfool
1,215 posts
 
Charles1dad does have a point here. While I fully understand Atmasphere's point he makes about substituting distortion for dynamics (I agree that what many people call brightness is actually distortion), Charles is right that this is oversimplification. Any musician does not naturally associate those two terms at all. Different types of systems reproduce amplitude differently, some much better than others, and I don't mean just on the loud end, but also the very soft end, which is especially important when listening to acoustically produced music, whether orchestral or jazz. This is an entirely separate thing from distortion. This is one big reason, for instance, why many professional musicians still prefer lower powered amps coupled with very high efficiency speakers - this combo, generally speaking of course, reproduces the entire dynamic spectrum more easily and more naturally sounding. That's getting pretty old school nowadays, with all the higher powered amps and lower efficiency speaker designs out there, but that's how most of us musicians who play acoustic instruments feel.
learsfool
1,215 posts
 
Thanks for the explanation, Atmasphere. I think much of this is a question of semantics, as you say - from your perspective, I understand even more now why you substitute the one term for the other in the context of most audiophile talk. I almost felt guilty even bringing it up, since normally you are the person on this board who is the very best at describing technical/electrical type things in layman's terms. I have learned very much from you about WHY I hear the things I do in various types of equipment and therefore have learned more about why my ear prefers the things it does. There are several other audiophile terms that musicians find the use of to be strange, but I'll drop the subject now - we've had threads about that before.
learsfool
1,215 posts
 
Several months ago now I posted a thread about volume and related hearing damage. Anyone interested should look it up.
learsfool
1,215 posts
 
The thread was called Sound Exposure and Potential Hearing Loss. For some reason I am unable to provide a link, sorry.
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