Mid level listening


I think that when listening to music it’s best to intently listen for the music rather than to the beauties of the sound production. In my opinion that is the most enduring pleasure you can get from your system. Unfortunately, for whatever reason it doesn’t always happen.   When you can’t seem to get fully into the music there’s something I’m calling mid level listening where you listen for the enjoyment of both SQ and the music itself.  I know ideally that should always happen to a great degree but it doesn’t always, which leads us to be dissatisfied with our rig.  
What do you think?

rvpiano

Showing 1 response by sns

I doubt an audiophile can ever get entirely away from the analytical perspective of listening. Last nights listening session veered wildly in both genre and recording qualities, I can never get over how widely variable recording quality can be, for instance I was listening to some big band music from the likes of early Count Basie, mono recordings with relatively small sound stage and lacking transparency/resolution, most would call these rather poor recordings  (not to say some 40's, early 50's recordings can be quite amazing), and then I went into some experimental electronica and contemporary  recordings of  northern European primitive music, sound quality amazing, huge sound stages, virtually no compression, just so alive!

 

And so the above listening session par for the course in that I can't help but hear so much recording quality variability, my mind can't help but process this. But then I move on from this moment of initial analysis nearly instantaneously into the pure enjoyment of  music mode. Between having built a system that is both highly transparent/resolving yet forgiving enough so the blemishes don't grate and training my mind to free itself from judgment and comparison I find myself enjoying far more variability in both recording quality and music genres. Having a quality streaming setup has completely changed my perceptions and enjoyment of both recording quality and music, I often let music play randomly from my huge library, seems crazy but I like everything the robot plays, I'm always highly involved in the music. hard to end listening sessions.