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.
