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Listening and evaluating equipment and systems.

I have found that listening to music is far more complex than simply hearing sound. A quick audition can reveal whether a system is bright, dull, thin, congested, or initially impressive. It tells us much less about whether it allows us to live with music… to relax into a performance, follow its structure, and keep discovering something in familiar recordings.

Critical listening can be useful, but it can also mislead. When we focus the mind’s ear on one sound… a drum strike, cymbal, vocal phrase, or bass note… much of the rest of the music recedes from awareness. If that sound is intermittent, we are only sampling brief fragments while other instruments are entering, fading, sustaining, and interacting. A speaker is never reproducing one isolated sound. Everything happening at once affects the whole presentation.

Music is a gestalt… rhythm, tone, dynamics, timing, space, harmony, and emotional intent occurring together. A system may impress by spotlighting details, yet prove less convincing over hours or days of actual listening. Another may seem less spectacular at first, but preserve the natural flow and wholeness of a performance more successfully.

The better test is to stop moving attention from one audiophile cue to another. Play complete albums over days or weeks and let the music direct your attention. A few minutes of analysis may identify a trait. Extended, undirected listening will tell you whether the system is truly right.

ghdprentice
jrareform's avatar
jrareform
208 posts
 

Lots of good comments here.  This reminds me of the different factors that go in to listening to music as a whole.  There's the beauty and emotional impact.  Then there's the cerebral part where the details sound interesting and are pleasing because they are exciting. 

Emotional impact can be lost when evaluating systems because we are typically listening with very familiar content for subtle changes usually especially with most cable changes.  This type of listening can get annoying and take away from the music.  This is why they call it the audiophile diseasecheeky

It's super important to not spend too much time evaluating equipment and more important allowing yourself to connect emotionally to the music.  Evaluate and move on.

As a side note to make things easier for A/B sessions - I typically first listen for "realness" - as in did this piece of equipment help me bring the reality of the performance or sound closer to me.  And then I determine whether it detracts or is "too much of a good thing" when certain recordings are rendered lifeless or distracting and whether I feel like going down a rabbit hole to attenuate the system to fix the new issues.

Enjoy the music!

stuartk
4,089 posts
 

@ghdprentice 

So, thinking about it... your system also pushes you to naturally listen in a certain way

Yes. So it’s important to be cognizant of which "way" of listening you prefer when buying gear/upgrading, no?

This is something each person must discover for him/herself.  

ghdprentice's avatar
ghdprentice OP
9,530 posts
 

@stuartk 

Yes, and it changes over time. I have a friend that got into high end audio about three years ago. His system sounded great. Then he put a huge amount of effort into it and suddenly it sounded like one of those cars full of subwoofers. Bass slapped you in the face... bass lines vibrated the room. I remember going through that stage as well. Nothing real about it... but sounds cool. So you play a lot of Marcus Miller and Stanley Clark. Then you try something else and the bass tilt has harmed the reproduction. So it is likely a moving target.... at least for most along the path. 

stuartk
4,089 posts
 

@ghdprentice 

I’m slowly learning what matters most to me and at this point, I feel I’m in a process of refining, rather than chasing one thing, then another. 

It’s easy for the discussion to devolve into "listening to music" vs. "listening to sonics". For me, emotional engagement is #1, with no exception. I used to define myself very much as a "music lover" rather than an audiophile. However, over time I’ve discovered that if highs are fatiguing, bass is sloppy, midrange is lean, immersion becomes much more difficult. These act as distractions, inhibiting my ability to connect with the music. I’ve accordingly adopted a "both/and" paradigm regarding the hobby. 

 

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