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 ?