How to listen .........

or teaching your grandmother to suck eggs !

It may seem a bit basic but in my experience people tend to listen to hifi in two ways ...

the first ...like my wife ...listens in a holistic way ...ie to the whole of the music ...and will often not know when asked if there was even a vocalist involved. Though she does know what sound good and what 's bad ...we have often been to friends or partys ..and when she leaves will say ..."how bad was that sound system ...!"

The second way ..and I feel I listen this way... is to be able to isolate a thread of the music or an instrament from the whole . I'm able to still appreciate the whole to ..but I'm able to zoom in on a feature or aspect of the music .

Having spent the best part of the last ten years building testing and listening to cables [ic's,speaker and power]
its clear to me a large proportion of the people who say they can't hear the difference swapping a cable can make ..listen to music in the whole or like my wife.

don't get me wrong ...there is no right or wrong way to listen !

I've had a number of examples like this over the years, one that stands out was..I went to see a chap ...to help him setup a new pair of speakers ...and try some different speaker cables ....

so once we'd done the speaker thing I suggested a ic cable swap ...off the top of my head he was using one of the van de hul's the first [?] maybe ...anyway the one with the carbon fibre ....certainly to my ears it was doing something very strange to the leading edges of note ..via his avi pre and power.

He said don't bother as he could not tell the difference ...anyway we swapped and guess what ...he could not tell the difference .

Which was odd because I could ...there was no longer a strange warble on some notes ......

S o I asked him how he was listening ......he had never considered there were different ways of listening.

After swapping back to the original cable we played several tracks that I find most people can listen to the various threads of the music ..once he had the knack of following a particular thread , we swapped the carbon fibre jobbie out and inserted solid core silver twisted pair [no shielding] .... he was very surprised ....to the point of thinking I'd messed around with other things whilst he was'nt looking.

Once we put the original cable back ...he found he was unable to listen to it ....as I'd pointed out the strange effect it was having on certain notes. and that was all he coulld focus on !


So what was the track I used ...... I think most people know it .....

track two on DSOTM on the run


So if you have read this far .......try this

firstly listen out for the turbo prop aircraft taking off ....

then replay the track and see how early on can you first pick up the whistle of its engines in the music mix.

Where does it start and where does it taxi to and which way does it take off

Then latter on in the track listen to the running feet ...can you hear what type of surface is he running on ?

What this thread is not about is cables ....I just used that as an example ...

Its to do with how you listen .....are there otherways That I've not considered ?

I believe that if you listen to a piece of music in its entirety you listen at a superficial (hmmm, not the right word - maybe overview?) level. If you listen to one instrument it's more analytical. I remember hearing a lecture how we can only focus fully on relatively small frequency spectra at one time. If you're trying to be analytical then when listening for bass frequencies you won't be properly hearing what the treble sounds like.

Then there are vocals. Personally I hear vocals as an instrument. Others listen intently to the words. Probably I'm dyslexic....this makes the processing of sounds harder so hearing a tune and making sense of the words at the same time is not as easy as some would think. Rather like when dyslexics read a book out loud, they can read the words but don't pick up on the story. I digress, but there are all sort of factors at play here.

yes very intresting ...will need to think about what you have said ..but I'm inclined to agree

hope thats in line with what I've said !

I find your post very interesting, and while pondering your perspective I found I have one of my own.

Having owned so many systems over the years while chasing audio nirvana, I have formed an opinion that noting details vs listening to the whole is both involuntary and system specific…I’ll explain.

Numerous systems that I have assembled have been of the nature that would cause me to take note of details within the whole, one system may draw attention to bass instruments, another would be the best guitar system, still another would render vocals scary real…yet these same systems would leave me wanting something, something unidentified.

In the late 80’s I put together a system that was so detailed the listener could follow any instrument or vocal of their choosing. I would get feedback from Friends that my system allowed them to hear things in an album or CD that they had never heard there before…but again, this system left me wanting.

Hey, I’m the kind of person that would chase down the ideal at any cost; I purchased the Krell KSA-250 when it first hit the market, purchased Classe M-1000 monoblocks when no one else had heard of them, spent crazy money on everything EAD could build in digital front ends…and when the B&W 801 S3 came out – I had to have them – then modified the crap out of them.

That entire paragraph was intended only to evidence that my homework is complete…but all that gear equated to…something just not quite right. What I was looking for, or listening for, entirely without knowing it, wasn’t there. When I would sit for hours and listen to these systems, one system would be of the type that would cause me to be aware of certain “things” within the music, while another system would draw me into the whole performance (preferred), and yet when I wanted to focus on a detail it was not easy to follow.

The system I have today has taken me many years to assemble, predominantly because it required a bit of time travel within my own mind to remember and determine the most musical gear I have heard, and then of course once identified and purchased, some of the gear took serious time and money to have restored.

But today I listen to the “music”. I find myself sitting down with the intent to spend an hour listening, only to have the Wife bellow that I’ve been “down there” for the entire day. When I choose I can follow JPJ of Led Zeppelin on bass to my hearts content, I can single out Andrea Corr even when her Sisters chime in…but what I enjoy the most about this most recent system is that I get completely lost in the music…and only when I so choose do I take note of the details.

My 402 cents….

Seems to be a real problem amongst audiophiles; listening to music that is :lol:
Strange really given the whole purpose of a stereo is to listen to music. Maybe we should have classes to teach those ignorant music lovers and musicians how to appreciate music……..wait, silly me, I keep forgetting, it’s not about appreciating music, its about analyzing the kit!
Get over yourselves ffs :lolsign:

If your stereo makes listening to music this much of a problem you’ve got the wrong kit.

Yep ... I'm with all of this so far .... I guess an ideal sysytem would be detailed enough where one can when one desires ,, dive in and focus on any particular part or instrument of the performance .. but not detailed to the extent where one particular part would constantly draw one's attention to it .. I love to sit sometimes and just listen to the bass drum .. or indeed the bass lines .. then concentrate on the rythm guitar .. and it is fantastic to be able to do this .. BUT .. the performance on a whole when retreating from an individual facet of it has still got to have a certain magic .. and an ability to keep you listening. That's the bottom line .. finding a system that keeps you listening and involved in what we all love ... THE MUSIC ... :cool: ..........

and you can listen any way you want that satisfies that need ..... ;)

John,

I think you've got a real hang-up about this, you bang on about it at the slightest opportunity. This thread is mostly about how people listen to music, yes some of the explanations involve what some kit does or doesn't do but we are talking about ways of listening.

So, how do you listen? Can you appreciate an entire complex piece at once, do you focus on vocals, certain instruments? I believe that listening via a system in a room is very different to listening to say a basic radio. The basic radio gives you the fundamentals of a piece of music but misses out a lot too. So I think with a radio it is easy to listen to all that's on offer. A hi-fi system offers a lot more information and maybe sometimes it's too much to ask to have us take it all in at once (could be due to mood) so some of us zero on specific aspects - hopefully not always the same aspect.

On the whole tend to agree with John view unless you either developing, reviewing or purchasing.
I guess we all different and we get attracted to music for different reasons, generally for me its the organic whole, its about how it brings me closer to the music, but I know other people its different.
I do admit if I was to demo gear I be expecting to hear certain things but this is based on my own bias view of how I enjoy music and does not mean to say its right
In the end we end up with the system our ears and personal bias deserves

Maybe everyone subconsciously tunes into certain musical aspects, I can can believe that most sane people won't have analysed this! Just as with eating some highly flavoured and spiced food, you can't appreciate all the ingredients but some predominate and catch your attention. I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this but we must be filtering out some information so we can make sense of a music piece as a whole. I can imagine this is why a basic radio can sometimes be very enjoyable to listen to, it's not demanding too much of our brain to listen to it. However smart we think we are, there's only so much of the information hitting our senses that our brains can process in real-time.

Agree