What exactly is critical listening? Who does it?

@mapman +1 This is more what critical listening means for me, critical listening is listening with great intention, again, critical doesn't mean judgement. On the other hand, analytical listening mode is intentionally judgemental, you are listening specifically for qualities of sound rather than sound quality. Critical listening should bring about appreciation for sound quality, I go into virtually every listening session with great intention for appreciation of sound quality, I donj't listen to my main system casually. Now sometimes during these critical listening sessions I may hear something in certain recordings that is salient to the point it brings about an intention to analyze.

After decades of practice/experience I'm always aware of the listening mode I'm in. Critical mode is my favorite mode, again, this is not a judgemental mode. At this point in my audio journey I'm never in pure music appreciation mode when I listen to my audiophile system. Per the above I'm mostly in critical listening mode, this is intentionally an appreciation for both the sound quality of my system and the performance of the musicians. And this is also necessarily an appreciation for the engineering/production values of the recording, something that seems to be completely forgotten in this discussion. The kind of appreciation I'm speaking of here is non judgmental so that recordings with flaws can  be enjoyable. 

Bottom line, I'd find this entire endeavor intolerable if I couldn't listen with great intent and non judgment  to the musical performance, sound quality of both my system and the recording, perfection rarely if ever exists, flaws are ever existent  I submit the entire reason I got into this was to have appreciation of all three of these aspects of listening to recordings on an audiophile system. If I'm only seeking musical enjoyment I can find that easily enough with relatively low end systems such as in my cars or work system, with these systems I care little about system and recording sound quality. My take is if you're not listening to your system critically, something in the system isn't aligned with your sound preferences and/or pales in comparison to some reference system you heard or have illusions about. 

It's just OCD man, pure and simple. Enjoy what you like and forget the rest. 

I've noticed that critical reviewers listen for the clang of the symbols as in 23 seconds into Mahler's 3rd symphony.

https://youtu.be/Xplx64LVENg?si=7DrIFtoJx5tV9E-P&t=23

Why are so many caught up in this insecure narrative that if you critically listen to music your not enjoying it. Do these people "critically" hear themselves lmao. Ok to demonstrate the ironic doofury it takes of such claims, the following must be true of these music purists. They still own a black and white TV, because obviously you wouldn't want to let an awesome modern picture distract you from enjoying your movie, or wait, they still use a flip phone because I mean who wants to hear the person on the other line with all the noise canceling technology to take away from the conversation 🤣, or how about those photos that captures an entire landscape as if you were a professional photographer, I mean how distracting from the enjoyment of experiencing a blurry photo. Why people bother to make this an issue reminds me of a bunch of grandma's in a knitting convention complaining about kids these days. Seriously everyone accepts and oodles over technology in every other field but someone made half the people so insecure about the word audiophile and what that must say about them, almost as if they are afraid it would be followed by "hipster". Anyways hope this helps put things in perspective for the self inflicted victim crowd.