Yesterday I made the point that we're all golden eared "experts" if we want to be.
What's that mean? Well, anyone can hear the striking difference between a high-end music system and a run of the mill home audio setup. All we need is an excellent high-end system, some well recorded music, and a moment to close our eyes and enjoy.
No experience necessary.
Now for the flip side of that. Learning how to listen when we need to get down to something specific and what to do about it.
That's quite different than just appreciating the magnitude difference between a high-end system and a consumer-grade system.
I am in the process of writing an entire series for the Audiophile's Guide. The two existing books, The Stereo and The Loudspeaker will be completely revamped and updated. Then, I will add in 8 more, focusing on analog, turntables, subwoofers, etc. Each book in the series will be a quick start guide and a deep dive, all of them designed to help your systems perform at its best.
Part of the series delves a bit into how to listen and what to do about what you hear.
Here's an excerpt:
How to listen
Small to large differences in sound quality on a high-end audio system are not always obvious to the untrained ear. This phenomenon is similar to the culinary world. While it may be clear that two preparations of the same dish taste different, it often takes training to identify the specific elements that set them apart.
Consider two chefs preparing the same pasta dish. An average diner might simply say one tastes better than the other. However, a trained palate could pinpoint that one chef used fresher basil, a touch more garlic, or a higher quality olive oil. Similarly, in audio, an untrained listener might merely prefer one system over another, while a seasoned audiophile could identify specific attributes like improved soundstage depth, better bass definition, or more natural timbre.
You hear with your ears but listen with your brain. While this may seem an academic observation, it has major ramifications when it comes to the art of high-end audio. Good listeners—sometimes called Golden Ears—are made, not born. It is only through training that you can become a good listener, capable of discerning small nuances in music's reproduction that will help you build a great audio system.
When I first began my Hi-Fi journey back in the early 70s, I could only broadly tell differences between equipment and speaker setups: this one had better bass, perhaps the highs extended further through a particular piece of gear, or the midrange felt recessed with the speakers one way and exaggerated the other way. But it was always a struggle identifying the more subtle details that experienced listeners seemed to instantly pick up on. Only through lots of listening and the kind help of Stan Warren, my friend and co-founder of PS Audio, did I eventually get the hang of how to listen.
I have discovered over the years that it is far easier to help newcomers hone their listening skills by pointing out what to listen for, rather than attempting to educate them as to how it should sound. If you know where to focus your attention, it’s pretty easy to tell whether a particular area of sound is more or less real, greater or lesser in quantity, or better or worse in quality. This training is even valuable for non-experts, since as you listen to a broader variety of music, you’ll quickly find patterns in the reproduction that you like or do not like—getting the music to suit your tastes over a broad range of recordings.
When learning how to listen, it’s most helpful to have music you can rely upon. That’s one of the reasons I recommend starting with the Audiophile’s Guide setup recordings from Octave Records. It’s available in CD, high-resolution download, and vinyl formats, and it’s been carefully curated to represent what great recordings sound like.
....and so on. I'll let you know when the series launches.
