The trained listener
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsForty something years ago when Terri and I first began having children, ultrasound technology was in its infancy. The doctor would show us unrecognizable blurry blobs that only he and other experienced viewers could make out as anything but, well, blobs. They seemed to know what it all meant, but to our untrained eyes, they could have been anything.
In the same vein, you can set two glasses of wine down in front of me and I can tell you which I like and don’t like, but not much more. Try the same thing in front of a Master Sommelier and you’ll be accurately told the wine’s year, location, and brand.
Set an experienced listener in front of a high end stereo system and they can easily tell you what’s going on in the system. Or, if you’re like some of us, we can tell you what’s likely going on inside the circuits processing the sound.
In each case the difference between observers is experience. Training.
It is no more accurate to say that the difference between cheap and expensive wines is undetectable in a double blind test than the same for a stereo system.
Our measure of veracity is always personal. What we can accurately say is that we cannot tell the difference.
We ain’t me, or you.
Mass spectrometry allows to measure each wanted and unwanted ingredient of a wine. Ultrasonic imaging has made huge improvement during the last 40 years allowing high resolution 3-D images and even color coded velocity measurement. In the meantime 16 bit 44.1 kHz RBCD recording had resulted in even poorer recordings with loss of resolution for sharp transients in music signal. Maybe AI is necessary for state-of-the-art recording allowing to detect the characteristic patterns and adapting the accuracy. 44.1 kHz might not be sufficient to exactly get recorded the sharpest transients and their peak (!) values! Not to mention all kind of jitter, quantization errors, reconstruction filter errors etc.. Where is the real progress compared to US imaging technology. I guess digital audio primarily was about cost reduction concerning mixing, mastering and production of records/discs.
Beg to differ. AFAIK, you can take every identified molecule in a wine, mix them together and it will not produce the gestalt of a refined vintage. HPLC/Mass Spec can identify many molecules by their characteristic diffusion rate in a calibrated medium and molecular weight, but we have not catalogued every molecule that appears in every wine; and separating molecular complexes that are closely related and similar MW is uncertain.
Smell is the better part of taste, and our nose differentiates molecules by dimensions and three dimensional charge shape, a metric that is far more data rich than the primitive chromatography columns and flinging molecules into a vacuum. Human smell has degraded a lot from living in stale indoor air and stinky, polluted environments; and earlier too from our evolutionary switch to dependence on sight, hearing, intelligence, cooperation, and tools to hunt so our olfactory equipment is far less informative than canine and feline; but is still capable of far more subtle distinctions than our scientific apparatus when properly trained and conditioned.
Indeed. However my point rather was that mass spectrometry will allow to characterize the smell of wine allowing to measure the content of tannin or fuselage. As it is possible to measure the ingredients of perfumes. But in the end there is the quality problem based on the most individual smell and taste preference (being trained). Some like mold cheese, broccoli or asparagus while other hate it. Not to mention some exotic meals from China, Japan , Iceland or Sweden etc. (swallow nests, eye of tuna, bar ark (rotten shark) or surstromming, etc,). 🙂 The problem is: the sense of taste can dramatically change when aging! And as you sometimes mentioned: it is possible to design and build specific loudspeakers best suited for the reproduction of specific instruments and their specific timbre. Shouldn’t it be possible to measure those characteristics?
‘Training’ meets ‘veracity’ in Paul’s upcoming book,
“The Audiophile’s Guide”…
…to better listening?
But seriously, double blind tests wont tell you what long term listening will.
A great man once said,
“I am he as you are he as you are me & we are all together”
Goo goo g’joob!
There are some things that only experience brings. Ultimately, it is the expressions on one’s face listening to a well implemented system, and to see or feel “goose-bumps” during that session that always brings the satisfaction as a result of that experience.
Don’t think you have to be trained to listen to audio equipment any more than you have to be trained in mechanics to drive a car.
No, but if you want to be able to tell by feel what is wrong with a car then you need training. And that was the point.
I get the point. The average car driver relies on warning lights and safety systems to be told if anything is wrong, not their own detection. An experienced professional driver will know if a tyre is slightly flat, whereas everyone else relies on a tyre pressure monitoring and warning system. Automotive engineers are laser-focused on their customer’s needs. I wonder how many audio companies really are.
Audio engineers need to be able to hear the effect of circuit and component changes. What you describe is people listening to audio as engineers. FatRat is brilliant at summing up the consumer’s viewpoint, because he was an audio dealer, so naturally sees through the customer’s eyes, who usually know nothing technical at all and are more likely to discuss colour options than brands of resistors. Most consumers, however, are very clear about what they like and don’t like. Ask my wife. She hates Focal. She loves Wilson. She doesn’t want to be trained to know why, she just knows.
Likewise, a good sommelier will seek information about about the guest’s taste preferences rather than pontificate on meteorological statistics around Pienza in 1985, of which they may well have a profound knowledge, but most people aren’t interested.
My interest, you may have guessed, is the bridge between manufacturer and consumer, which seems to me to be one of the big weaknesses in parts of the audio industry.
Well done Steve.
My husband’s coffin size speakers are made by Focal. I couldn’t care less. They sound beautiful. We drink wine together and get educated over time about the flavors, regions, types, etc. And we hate pontificating by sommeliers or wine makers.
And speaking of cars, have you been to the RAC in Pall Mall? They have these beautiful old cars that they change every week in the entry area. Magnificent engineering pieces but useless for current driving. A good friend of my husband tales us to dinner almost every time we go to London.
I see these old cars the way I see most of the people here pontificating about “equipment”. You have to be part of the “club”, the selected ones, the chosen ones that have thus learnt how to listen. How to hear. Never mind what Toole and Olive researched about psychoacustics. It is part of this “quasireligious” sect.
I suppose Focal speakers are coffins for people with Scoliosis. I have been to the RAC Club, they have very good squash courts and a nice pool. My dad and I used to go every year to the start of what is now called the Veteran Car Run, organised by the RAC, about 75 miles from London to Brighton in cars vintage 1904 or earlier.
I started a thread recently in the forum asking for trained listeners to come forth and one did, helpfully pointing out the work of Dr Olive and Harman International. The Golden Ears Club is not one to which I’ve been invited to join and, like Groucho Marx, may resign preemptively.
My wife and I drink wine and don’t get educated, we get incoherent, preferably in France, Italy or Spain. She’s not fussed where.
I think I will like your wife, and my husband will probably like you too. We are not fussy wine drinkers, we prefer the more sedate Paso Robles to Napa. We also love to travel to Spain, Italy and France. Preferably, to ride the bikes, but it seems we use it as excuse to then drink and eat merrily. He speaks Spanish, English, French, some Italian and Portuguese, I just have to enjoy the places.
You don’t need to be a mechanic to know when something is very wrong with a car because it won’t start or drive properly. All you need to know is how the car should start and drive. Similarly you don’t need to be an experienced listener to know that what comes out of a hi fi system has something very wrong with it if you are expecting it to sound like a symphony orchestra if you know what it should sound like.
But only if you compare it with a symphony orchestra!
Listen to the song “Asilo” from the Uruguayan musician Jorge Drexler. They sound as if they were in your room. He made sure you hear what you wants you to hear. You truly can get him to play this for you. Even if the voices you know are not exactly as if he was singing in your room.
I listened to Lang Lang play Bach’s Golbergs and it sounded like Schumann. Do I need new speakers?
Will look up Señor Drexler.
Lang Lang is really something “special”. We saw him play in LA Rachmaninov second and even Dudamel looked like he lost his patience with him. We definitely did.
What do you mean? Please explain.
He was extremely ponderous. His tempo varied tremendously from the “norm”. He would slow down a lot and even stop too long on occasion.
How sad. This is one of my favorite pieces of music. Of all the recordings I own of it my favorite is Van Cliburn with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Reiner. Beautiful performance, beautiful recording on RCA Red Seal. Recorded in 1960 at the height of Van Cliburn’s career just after he came back from Moscow where he won the Tchaikovsky competition.
My favorite of the third is Argerich. She milks the third for all it’s worth. Easily the best I’ve every heard.
Is that the right analogy? You do need to be trained to drive the car.
You’re not maintaining the audio equipment, just listening, in both cases their fundamental purpose.
I do agree with your last paragraph.
Barely. We have a Nissan Leaf with e-drive. You press the “On” button, put your foot on the pedal and it goes forward, the harder you press the faster it goes, and as you take your foot off it slows down. If you take your foot off quickly you don’t get thrown out of the front window. You obviously have to steer it. A 4-year-old with long arms and legs could drive it. It’s less complicated than playing a record on a stereo system.
The difficult bit is learning the rules of the road so as not to kill other people.
One thing you certainly don’t have to know is what goes on under he bonnet. I’ve never even opened the bonnet. I assume there is a bonnet. All I know is the little flap where you plug it in and that opens from the door fob.
That is exactly what I told my husband. I don’t want to know about the equipment. Just program the remote so I can choose the music I want to listen. He is the technician if something goes awry.
My wife is bilingual – Spotify and Roon. Never in a million years ….
You don’t have to understand audio to play in an orchestra or for a recording, but you do have to train your ears to live music to hear what is universally wrong with audio.
Or you could not train them and just enjoy it, preferably with a nice Puillac, which you can’t do in most convert halls.
p.s. Audio is not universally wrong, it’s just different, but similar enough not to get too stressed about it.
We like “convert” halls too. It seems you have already enjoyed the “Pulliac” (sic) too much today.
Having spent most of my working life in electronics, part of that very early learning was in transmission line theory or more accurately the distributed-element model applied to a transmission line etc etc.
This experience didn’t alert me one iota to the future crazy ascending purchase prices of audio cables and the differences thereof.
To say I am also gobsmacked by the differences therein is an understatment.
As they say, you live and learn but if you’d told me that fifty years ago I wouldn’t have believed you.
Then there’s the Paris Wine Tasting of 1976 (Judgment of Paris).
When I was into wine as a serious hobby I’d read the reviews of “experts.” Two acknowledged experts were Robert Parker and James Suckling. There were meany times when their reviews of the same wines, invariably expensive top rated Bordeaux were so different in the way they described the taste and their ratings so different you wouldn’t know that they were describing the same thing. Or maybe they weren’t. There’s a thing called “bottle variation.” Did I taste what either of them described? No. Did I like them as much as they did? No. So I sold them all (legally) and drink California Cabernet almost exclusively. (I made an enormous profit on them.) I like them much better and their price is what top rated Bordeaux cost 30 years ago before the craze. My interest in wine has dwindled considerably. There are some flavors and aromas you are born to taste, salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and now umami. Others are learned from experience. The analogies of the taste and aroma of wine the experts made did not correlate to my experience. And the rhapsodic waxing of poetry and emotion about wine seemed as stupid to me then as the same about audio equipment and music does to me now. Lots of things in life are in my experience are overly hyped. Travel is at the top of my list. For the price of one vacation trip you can buy an 85″ flat panel TV set and a library of travel log DVDs and watch them in the comfort of you own home. I did a lot of traveling and I came to hate it.
Some of what you can hear you are born with. The ability to tell the direction a sound is coming from is hard wired into your brain. From the time I was born until I was two and a half years old by sheer luck I had extensive exposure to highly reverberant sound fields several times a day. To this day I cannot walk under an overpass without shouting my name and listening for the reflections. I live out in a rural area where the houses are far apart. When I had dogs they were free to run outside unsupervised on one acre of my property wearing collars and restrained by an invisible fence. Many times I’d go outside and summon them by name shouting “FOOD” and they’d come running. I always listened to the sound of my voice reflecting off nearby houses that were over 100 feet away. When I was 25 years old I studied reflections of sound using my analytical tools and figured out what they did and how they affected sound and perception of it. But it wasn’t until my 40s that I began to become a golden ears listener of the quality of individual musical instruments. When my aunt’s Steinway piano moved into my house and I could hear it distinctly and often I became very aware of “the Steinway sound” and how different it was from my Baldwin piano. That family heirloom has its characteristic unique sound in the extreme. I’ve come to love it and recognize it. It’s not that the Baldwin sound is bad, far from it but it doesn’t have the “warmth” of the Steinway sound. Both are often described as a steel fist in a velvet glove. Steinway has more velvet. I had countless experiences listening to violins, at least hundreds of them from $10 to $10,000,000 dollars in value.
Combining my experience with live musical instruments and what acoustics does to their sound I’ve got it pretty down pat in my head. I love a good hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut and a cold beer but it doesn’t compare to the enjoyment I get out of a BBQ rack of pork ribs and a bottle of even cheap champagne. So for me I had to invent the equivalent of sound systems to listen to recordings. I still enjoy the hot dogs which IMO is what everyone else listens to. But I can also enjoy recordings on my computer monitor’s speakers very much while audiophiles seem to constantly be looking for something better. They never seem happy for very long or they wouldn’t be constantly shopping, swapping, and comparing. Last night I had some Hormel canned chili. It was okay and I enjoyed it. Not as much even as home made chili but I didn’t expect it to taste like that. If all you have is canned music then learn to enjoy it. Even those big stupid Wilson Chronosonic XVX produce canned music. That name reminded me of Alexander Benjamin the self proclaimed dragon slayer who used to post here. He was really into $100,000+ hand made wristwatches when the most accurate wristwatch in the world was a $400 Casio electronic watch at the time. I think and hope it was me who sent him screaming in terror into the night never to be seen or heard from in these parts again. I don’t think he could slay a mouse. His day job was figuring out ways to tax the residents of New York City. In short he was a rat and deserved to get run out of town.
Go easy on the hot dogs, SM. I limit myself to one a year, and it is such a delicacy.
Being from New Jersey and now really enjoying my new Presto deep fryer (I use peanut oil, very high smoke temperature) I intend to try what I hear is a New Jersey favorite, fried hot dogs. I only buy Hebrew National. They’re kosher and have to answer to a higher authority 🙂 No noses, lips or ears, just beef and spices. Yum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1gKYL2XlZs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH2IigYshvY
I hope your Presto fryer is not as dangerous as ones people use to cook turkeys at Thanksgiving. We don’t want to lose you, SM.
Rutt’s sounds good. We used to have a place like that around here, but the old building became too expensive to maintain, so it was torn down and replaced with a Taco Bell.
Not the same.
Re: hot dogs, I like them cooked over charcoal with the sides slightly blackened and split, but since I only have one a year, I usually order out–probably not as healthy as your kosher brand.
Also, will make a donation to NRDC. They do good work and are strong enough to get the job done.
It is nothing like a turkey fryer. I have one of those and used it twice many years ago. You are right, it is very dangerous. I used special precautions to prevent it from catching fire or splattering. It takes two people to put the turkey in and remove it the way I do it. The burner is off during that time so there is no chance of the oil igniting. I had a bucket of sand and a fire extinguisher. I was over 100 feet from my house. I have a large backyard. I think an electric one would be better. If you’ve never tasted a fried turkey you have no idea how good turkey can be. I’ve roasted a lot of turkeys but nothing comes remotely close to frying one.
I bought a lot of new kitchen toys. One of my favorites is the Instant pot duo crisp plus air fryer. It makes great ribs in under an hour but I still use my wall oven for caramelizing the BBQ sauce. I’ve got a recipe for keto NYC cheesecake. All I’m short is a couple of eggs and some vanilla extract. For baking the best artificial sweetener appears to be saccharine. It seems that unlike others it does not loose its sweetness when heated according to Sweet ‘n Low. It also doesn’t have a bitter aftertaste like Stevia. The crust is made with crushed almonds and butter instead of graham crackers. I bought extra gaskets as recommended. The original one smells from BBQ rub I put on my ribs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz9mEpLvrzk
There’s no way an air fryer comes close to an oil fryer. The oil of choice is peanut oil. High smoke temperature, no taste.
Actually, I’ve had fried turkey before, and you’re quite right–it’s delicious. My grandfather was a butcher and he taught my father, who then taught me how to carve turkey. Rather than slice the breasts on a 45 degree angle, which lets all the juice run out, we carve horizontally, from the top down, one side at a time to retain the moisture in each piece. It makes a big difference. Also, only carve what you can eat at a dinner, e.g. carve the other side the next day, again, to retain the moisture.
I’ll pass your other ‘secrets’ on to my wife. Happy New Year,
I recall being sent a Fried Turkey stupid disaster on YouTube, went searching for it to share here; …MY GOODNESS!! more than one, a LOT more stupids.
You have to do it yourself. It’s the only way to get things done right.
No, we are not born with the ability to hear the direction sound is coming from. It is not hard-wired, nor is the ability to recognize any aural object or acoustics. Neuro-genesis and formation of neural decoding networks are stimulated by repeated coherent, correlated sensory stimuli.
Infants raised in a highly reverberant environment (concrete rectilinear room) with only the sounds of other orphans vocalizing incoherently do not grow enough brain cells to make any sense out of sound, nor the ability to recognize objects visually. Rather, their brain growth is so stunted they die of microcephaly before they are one year old.
Conversely, children who are not merely conditioned to normal household sounds but also given musical instruments and lessons develop a much more refined sense of sound vectors and acoustic space than children raised on audio and/or other de-correlated noises. The same applies to children raised in forests and canyons who hear sounds of Nature in reverberant environments and learn to correlate multiple echo directions through the directional phase encoding of acoustically generated transient waveforms by the external ears – they grow bigger brains to hear better, just like conservatory trained musicians.
Interestingly, since everyone from last Century was still raised on acoustic voice based instruction, sound vectors and acoustic space sensing for human speaking voice are mirrored in their neural network growth, wiring and conditioning. That is why the “ONE EAR TEST” is properly done with a person talking rather than playing an instrument.
If you put on a blindfold and plug one ear, you can still hear where a human speaker is in the room and get a sense of the room size, shape and furnishing; but this does not work for a loudspeaker, because your ears are specifically trained (“broken in”) to NOT hear where that speaker is in the room. If your neural circuits were developed to hear where audio comes from, then the “stereo image” collapses.
It also does not work for continuous tones, because vector direction sensing and echo triangulation depends on characteristic transient waveforms of consonants reflecting, whether musical, incidental sounds or vocalizations. This is an aid to the illusion of stereo imaging, because loudspeakers have evolved to scramble the phase of off-axis transient waveforms. This insures that the listening room reflections will have incoherent phase and not match the direct sound vector phase information.
This is also related to the ability to hear absolute phase, because an open door or window will reverse the phase of a reflection, and only for lower frequencies. If you train to hear the sound of an open door when there is no sound coming from the other side, you are also training to hear whether an audio system is right wired or backwards.
Speaking of, loudspeakers generate a sound pattern like an open window because the edges of the baffle diffract sound waves like the edges of an open window with the same height, width and radius. To get an idea of how distinctive this is to a trained ear, consider that blind bicyclists who learn to navigate by sound in traffic can tell where there is a stop sign by the octagonal sound shadow, which sounds different than a round or rectangular sign. This has been verified in laboratory controlled (DOUBLE BLIND) conditions!
This provides an indication of how delusional “stereo imaging” is. When I searched Stereophile magazine archives for “pin-point imaging”, in every case it was describing a speaker with a small, sharp edged, rectangular baffle with symmetrical driver location. Physics tells us this generates a substantial amount of high frequency lobing from edge diffraction, which audio reviewers fool themselves into thinking is spatial information from the recording!
You can test this by rounding over the edges of your baffles to 1/2″ radius and listening to your favorite recordings. The “”image” will have blurred!
Then how do animals learn to do it? Funny, I just remembered that when we took my dog home from North Shore Animal League she was 3 months old. Every time there was a beep or some other noise in the car she turned her head to see where it was coming from. All animals with binaural hearing can do it. It is a primary survival strategy.
AHH! Bad analogy. Canines, equines, felines, bovines, pachyderms and porcines have directional outer ears. They move them until the sound comes into focus, and know the direction from haptic feedback, which includes the neck muscles as well as ear muscles. This also aligns the eyes automatically, so they readily learn the visual correlation between the sound and the source.
The convoluted outer ears are common to simians, and are necessary to hear in all directions at once so we primates can live as physically un-endowed omnivores in arboreal environments. We have herbivore teeth, laughable claws, are poor sprinters and to hunt while avoiding predation we need advance warning and group cooperation.
Now cetaceans detect direction from inter-aural differences, but also from the reflection of a shaped wave produced by forehead radiation which can beam short wavelengths like a radar. But again, this is learned by listening and correlation of aural stimuli to other senses.
so much for ‘privileged male humans’ eh?
Soundmind, looks like you want to be our own newsgroup’s ‘Andre Jute’.
Anyone here who used to hang out on the Joenet will understand.
One doesn’t need to be a trained listener to know whether or not one likes the sound of audio electronics/speakers.
One DEFINITELY needs to be a trained listener to hear all the nuances that determine whether or not audio electronics/speakers are ok, good, very good or excellent.
Sometimes when I hear a newly released song or a song I have never heard before Im not inpressed by it but as you hear it more and more you begin to understand the art of the song. It’s the same for great paintings. I guess you can call better appreciation for the artistic part of anything a sort of training. Without understanding differences between good or bad its hard for some to enjoy something good anymore than something bad. To them there is little or no difference and to other’s the difference is huge.
Paul, there is a point here which I believe is not acknowledged as much as it should be.
Even without consciously attempting to learn to become a discriminating listener I believe many of us attain skills we may not be fully aware of. Simply the process of careful listening over a number of years means we learn to find details the casual listener misses. That comes in steps so as time passes we become more skillful in identifying differences.
Some may make a conscious effort to improve those skills and they may reach a greater level of discrimination. But most of us in this hobby become more adept than we even think about.
Listen for ease of following the tune. Try and sing or hum along with the tune. Better still try a harmony. The easier it is to do this, the better the system.
https://www.linn.co.uk/tunedem
You don’t have to be a trained listener to know the difference in sound between the beautiful tones of the best acoustic musical instruments and the flat dead mediocre sound that that comes out of a can labeled high end audiophile equipment. If you can’t tell the vast difference you are either very inexperienced with the best real music or you are stone cold deaf. IMO the reviewers who praise canned music are both.
By the same token, I don’t confuse the experience of standing atop one of the 14ers with the photos I take from such a pinnacle, nor would you. Yet I can still tell the difference between a great photo taken there, from a snapshot. I just don’t confuse the photo with the experience of being there, although there may be some striking visual similarities.
In my research I found that professional musicians are bi-furcated into two groups. Ones who learned to hear music predominantly from mixers and speakers, whether studio reproduction or stage PA, develop unconscious compartmentalization of sound so they expect recordings and amplified concerts to sound like mainstream recording techniques: mixed mono multi-tracks with extensive processing by equalizers, compressors, and artificial reverbs, and stereo separation through pan pots. They do not appreciate my speakers and recordings, because they have heard only recordings that are “perfected” by extensive engineering modifications to match the score notations, and to squeeze the music into two speakers with consumer audio bandwidth and dynamic range.
It is an unfortunate affect of educational economics that even conservatory student fall into this category too often. There are far fewer opportunities to hear a wide range of music performed, as top level concert seating is now three figures, even when donations cover 2/3 of the bill; and season musical programs are scaled to the inferior musical education of the public, now 100 years behind the evolution of orchestral and chamber music.
OTOH, musicians who were raised by music professional parents or had siblings who helped fill the house with acoustic music for hours every day are averse to audio, studios and PA systems. It is the crowning achievement of a lifetime that I have built speakers that are transparent to these few musicians who hate speakers and audio paradigms as much as I do. No, these are NOT audiophile speakers, and audiophiles are as un-impressed with my work as audio engineers – for example, my speakers produce a gaping hole in the middle when you play conventional 2 channel recordings through them, they sound much better in mono as they were intended.
I would be most interested in working on a speaker array that combined my direct sound techniques with your ambient sound projection to re-create the sound I hear from the front rows of concert halls, in a system for near coincident pair recordings with less reverb than is commercially acceptable.
When parked in the sweet spot chair and listening critically, I tend to notice the weaknesses. When listening while reading or moving about, its the strengths of the system that will grab my attention. I’d suggest that the car analogy applies only if you are comparing a high performance car to a high performance audio system. Since a basic daily driver car is rarely driven “critically” and expectations are minimal. For us motorcycle guys, we know how laser focused our “listening” skills can be when pushing the performance envelope of the machine. Thankfully, music gives life but is not a life or death endeavor 😉
Hopefully you recognize, dj, that as your listening skills improve, your laser focused riding skills decline and you adjust each endeavor accordingly. We don’t want to lose you. 😎
LOL – thank you! I’m 54 yo now so my days of pushing motorcycle envelopes are over – just fun memories. Happy I survived to enjoy new, safer, and more social hobbies that don’t require a helmet 🙂
The sound of motors inhibits your hearing physically as well as neurologically. The constant loud, repetitive, broadband, anharmonic throbbing masks acoustically generated sounds, echoes and fatigues your aural nerve endings. Racing motorcycles has been known to cause permanent hearing damage!
When I use motorized transport or walk around loud motor vehicles I use hearing protection; and motorcycles are some of the loudest when their exhaust systems are tuned for performance.
One can listen to reproduced music for years and not be able to tell the difference between systems because he or she never paid attention to the various characteristics of the reproduced sound or lacked the ability to perceive the differences. On the other hand some one who listens critically dissects the performance into it’s individual parts and then puts it together into a whole. More the experience greater the ability to tell small difference. The best of such people end up being the so called ” Golden Ears”. One thing for sure it takes both a good amount of time and ability which unfortunately everyone is not blessed with to the same extent. Nothing personal. It’s just the reality of things. Regards.
Okay, so there are some here that want to keep it simple, and others who like to dig a little deeper so if everything doesn’t go according to plan they have the knowledge to rectify it.
There’s room for both.
Not too much I’m skeptical about in HIFI based on personal experience except some power conditioning Accessories. Examples are cable sticks, plug purifiers etc. You can’t sell me on those.
AC regenerators? I think they are amazing and some think they are complete crap.
Training and experience is beneficial in that it typically exposes you to the best of sights, sounds, smells and tastes, whereas untrained people are not as likely to have experienced the finest that they could see, hear, smell or taste. The untrained and inexperienced often don’t know what they are missing.