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Listening Skills Part Duex: What are you listening for?

Had a few experiences lately that together were a stark reminder of something known for a long time, because I lived it myself.  

In the beginning, or at any rate going back to about 1991, I was unable to hear any difference between different CD players and DACs. Even some amplifiers, they might not sound exactly the same but I was hard pressed to say why.   

This went on for a long time. Months. Many months. Like okay a year. Whatever. During which time I was driving around hitting all the Seattle/Portland area stores listening to everything I could find. About the only difference big enough to be sure of was receivers. They for sure are crap. But even there it was hard to say exactly in what way. Just the difference there was glaring enough it was obvious this is not the way to go. But that was about it.    

All during this time of course I was reading Stereophile and studying all the reviews and building up a vocabulary of audiophile terms. The problem, seen clearly as usual only in the rear view mirror, was not really being able to match up the terminology with what I was hearing. I had words, and sounds, but without meaning, having no real link or connection between them.   

One day after yet another frustrating trip to Definitive I came home and put on my XLO Test CD and was listening to the Michael Ruff track Poor Boy when it hit me, THIS IS THAT SOUND!!!  

What sound? Good question! The better high end gear is more full and round and liquid and less etched or grainy. Poor Boy is Sheffield, all tube, and so even though being played from CD through my grainy etched mid-fi the tubey magic came through enough to trigger the elusive connection. THIS is "that sound"!  

Once triggered, this realization grew and spread real fast. In no time at all it became easy to hear differences between all kinds of things. "No time at all" was probably months, but seemed like no time at all compared to how long I was going nowhere.  

What happened? There are a near infinite number of different sonic characteristics. Attack and decay, fundamental tone, harmonic, and timbre, those were a few of the early ones I was able to get a handle on- but the list goes on and on.   

Just to go by experience, reading reviews, and talking to other audiophiles it would seem most of us spend an awful lot of time concentrating real hard on our own little list of these terms. We have our personal audiophile checklist and dutifully run down the list. The list has its uses but no matter how extensive the list becomes it always remains a tiny little blip on the infinite list of all there is.   

So what brought this to mind is recently a couple guys, several in fact, heard some of the coolest most impressive stuff I know and said....meh. Not hearing it.   

This is not a case of they prefer something else. This is not hearing any difference whatsoever. At all. None. Nada. Zip. 

Like me, back in the day, with CD.  

These are not noobs either. We're talking serious, seasoned, experienced audiophiles here. 

I'm not even sure it comes down to what they are listening for. Like me in '91, hard to know what you're listening for until you know what you're listening for.   

Which comes first?
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Showing 2 responses by hilde45

hilde45's avatar
hilde45
4,819 posts
 
A few comments about the above:

@whart -- love your answer. Especially the part about becoming a passionate student of music. The gear transported you to a new world of discovery. Job done!

There are so many ways to solve this, based on room, different equipment, type of source format and budget, that one wonders whether they are simply describing their preferred sound.

Compare with @oregon papa

I believe that the primary thing to listen for is the proper tonality of instruments. That, of course, requires knowledge of what live instruments sound like.

Comment: Why is it important for an oboe to sound exactly like an oboe? It’s a test for a system, but why is it important for musical experience? After all, I don’t care if the tree in a Monet painting looks a tree, do you? And when I eat a steak, do I know what real cow tastes like? No, I judge it based on other steaks I've eaten and not whether it traces back to the cow. We seek realism, but this term can be misleading; as @whart points out, there’s no secure way "back" to some singularly real original. But we can want it to sound "somewhat" like the instruments we've heard before -- I'd grant that. But then there are all those world instruments I've never heard in person, or electronica, etc. Like a good fantasy or science fiction story, I want to be enveloped in an experience -- but that's a wish for a kind of experience, not "a path back to the real."

@three easy and @reubent @has2be

Listening to music should simply be a joy...not something you have to train for. The ability for someone to hear something or not has no correlation whatsoever to the level of enjoyment they can derive from music.

"don’t worry, be happy"

By simply listening to music for years and decades . Through those times from beginnings as gear evolved and it comes naturally. Its not forced or strained or fretted over. It’s not some rare gift . Its memory like a reflex.


All three of these comments seem to be saying that a pleasure *should* be simple and that’s all it *needs* to be. This does not jibe with my experience.

I may enjoy something initially -- say, wine. Then someone says, "Notice how it tastes of feels at the end, as you swallow. That’s the ’finish.’" Then, I start attending to that. I notice it. It becomes part of my next tasting. I taste *for* it. I may even want it. What's happening? Experience thickens, pleasure thickens -- thanks to knowledge applied to perception.

Oh, and that’s not "worry" -- that *makes* me happy. Learning things which make experience richer makes me happy. Then again, I don’t associate thinking about something with being unhappy, and I don’t worry that creating complexity is necessarily a path to paralysis-by-analysis.
hilde45's avatar
hilde45
4,819 posts
 
I love this topic, OP. Well chosen and set up.

Here are a couple questions I'm especially interested in hearing your take on. These are earnest questions.

1. When you initially were trying to hear more, what was the reason? What motivated you to develop your listening acumen?

2. As you were initially listening around to try to hear more, you say you only heard differences between "receivers." But you were listening to different kinds of speakers -- did the big differences between speakers contribute to your eventual "aha" moment? (I'm wondering because sometimes there are multiple things at work in effectuating a change, and only later, in retrospect, do I realize the subordinate factors at work).

3. Around the time you developed your initial, stable checklist of audiophile terms to listen for, how did that affect your ability to listen for pleasure? Were you simply in critical listening mode all the time? Did you already possess an "off switch" for the critical way of listening or was that something you figured out later?

4. In the case of the seasoned audiophiles who couldn't hear a difference in what sounded to you like impressive gear, did you find out what in particular *they* listen for -- and could you hear it? Or was there no difference in that case for you?
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