Learning to listen like an audiophile

General Discvssions & Theory/Vnderstanding
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So the thread on quantifying your gear purchases got me thinking about when i began understanding how important learning to listen is in this hobby. I was in Phoenix Arizona spending a whole Sunday w/ my HiFi dealer. We had breakfast together and then he opened his store at around 11am to his regulars and set-up a spread of snacks and various Japanese fine alcohols. The first person to come visit was an older gentleman dragging along 2 milk crates full of records, each hand selected for it’s premium qualities that audiophiles find important.
By noon there were a dozen regulars gathered, picking favorite albums and playing particular tracks in order to listen for particular qualities to pick apart the equipment.
In particular cables were being picked apart that day, from regular $10 RCA’s, power chords and speaker cables to Nordost cables whose cost was in the excess of thousands of dollars each. Terms like, air, blackness, depth, height, width, fullness, thinness, color of tone, and other characteristics i was not familiar w/ were being discussed and folks were listening for particulars. Later that evening at dinner w/ my dealer as we spoke I understood i had no idea what i was doing in this hobby as i had heard very little that day that was able to discern no matter how hard i tried, it all basically sounded the same to me. This was almost 10 years ago, i made fun of the fact that i spent the day listening for air, height and weight. Today is a different story and this is my tale of the day i learned to listen like an audiophile. It’s been an expensive and at times stressful and painful journey for me but once the bug sunk its teeth into me the virus took hold and still drives my actions and any spare funds i manage to cobble together :crazy_face:

Feel free to share your own stories or experiences. Happy listening to all :hugs:

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I kind of did the whole learning to listen thing in easy mode.
When I first got to University there was a group of about half a dozen of us who got into Hifi, because we were all from different parts of the country and most of our gear was sourced in different brick and mortar shops we all had very different systems.
Many of our upgrades came from the same shop, so later Rega and Linn turntables were in all the systems except the one with the Revolver.

We’d spend hours listening to the systems and discussing them, sometimes swapping components, to better understand synergy between components.

We also spent an insane amount of time during the week at the local hifi store, often multiple afternoons a week. We were friends with the staff and as a group we spent significant money there and the staff would let us listen to stuff that was traded in.

As a result I heard a LOT of different components, but it was the long hours of discussions, that really taught me to listen.

The only interesting thing in my journey was I fell into the measurement/as the artist intended trap years after that. When I moved to the States none of my gear came with me, and when I did get back into it, there wasn’t a lot of overlap with gear I was familiar with, I didn’t have friends who were into hifi, and I went down that rabbit hole and spent the best part 5 years not really liking my system.

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I kind of did it the hard way. lol

As long as I can remember I would listen to music deeply, whether it was my parents big credenza sized record player with built in speakers or my self customized car stereo I was always enthralled by the listening experience.

My first job was in a bodega and when I got my first payday I bought, well not bought but put my first $5 dollar payment towards a JVC boombox that the bodega owner had taken from some guy that owed him money. lol

My father at the time worked in a factory in Newark NJ that made loudspeakers. Big 3 way 1970’s speakers the size of a college refrigerator. For the life of me I couldn’t remember the brand but when I finished the 7th grade I asked for a pair of speakers and he brought me a pair of the speakers he helped to make they were returns or 2nds or whatever but I was ecstatic. I then proceeded to drive them with the JVC boombox. When I finished the 8th grade and was going into HS I asked my parents for a stereo as my graduation present and I got a Fisher integrated receiver. Joy.

It was always solitary though as I never had close friends that would move mountains like I did to chase great sound.

I’ve self taught listened but never great gear and true world class sound until this latest reiteration of the hobby which started a year or two before Covid.

So I’ll rephrase the subject a bit ans say I’ve always appreciated good sound and that was my first step into listening like an audiophile. But to truly hear what you’re listening to, you need experience, lots and lots of experience.

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I’ve been thinking on a way to articulate this and I’ve been struggling so forgive whatever comes out now, I can elaborate more if it evolves into further discussion.

My experience is my own and not something I’ve discussed before, but this crowd is as good as any. I haven’t fundamentally changed my 2-CH system for some time now, easily over eight months without introducing an upgraded component and I’ve been feeling generally satisfied which interestingly enough also came with a drop in the amount of hours I’d been listening to music. The dip lasted pretty much through the winter which made me question as to whether or not it had all been a relentless chase and now that I was happy the impetus was not as great?

Clearly that wasn’t the case because over the spring I’ve been listening to music more and more, but I’ve also been tweaking my TV system and finalizing my headphone system. But as I started listening to my 2-CH again, I noticed so many more things about it, it was as if I was hearing the system for what it was instead of what I’d made it out to be during the chase. In other words, when I heard a flaw or something that could be better it didn’t feel like a failure. Which may be a weird thing to say but perhaps it resonates with some of you. I’m not stating this as a negative, on the contrary. I felt that I understood my system better than I’d ever understood it before. It gave me the motivation to re think my speaker and subwoofer placement which led to further improvement or at least showcased it as an ensemble, especially the integration between the sub and main speakers.

Anyway, that’s a bit of a background as to how I got to the topic. That being that the diminishing returns in high end gear is a bit of a misnomer or perhaps something that doesn’t exist in the way we’re led to believe.

I’m sure I’m not the first, as a matter of fact, I recall M0N speaking about it previously, but it’s all been theoretical as I’d never really felt that I hadn’t made progress in furthering the development of my chain; Until about 8 months ago when I simply stopped hearing things I didn’t like and figured that’s the natural stopping point.

That said over the last month or so after tweaking my speaker placement, moving some of my noise reduction power cables around and changing the power supply and DC cables to my digital front end, I’ve once again hit on a pretty massive leap in performance, to be honest, something that I wasn’t even ready for or expecting. Because as I said, eight or so months ago, I was perfectly content.

Perhaps taking the time to work on my TV system and focus on finishing my HP system allowed me to hear my 2-CH in a less critical but more honest way. More aware of what I was hearing again as it was fresh. The difference being is that I was able to really understand what I was hearing in a more profound way than previously. Less emotion, less frustration, less expectation perhaps and simply focus on what I was hearing.

Anyway, less than couple thousand dollars later after the tweaking, I’m hearing so much deeper into the details of recordings, the sound feels tangible in a way I’ve never experienced before and I’ve been having sessions when I hear things that I could only ever previously perceive while under the influence. :slight_smile:

Which leads me to this diminishing returns concept and why after years of building a system, orchestrating and curating every aspect to the smallest of details, I can still introduce changes that are this dramatic?

So perhaps it’s not the changes alone, perhaps I’m just better at listening than used to be?

Perhaps having addressed so many minor details over the years has left me with a system that multiplies the effect of changes that wouldn’t have had the same impact in an incomplete chain?

Maybe spending time listening deeply to my other systems, allowed me to hear this one without that sense of judgement?

I’m sort of grasping at ways to explain the experience, but that’s that. Clearly the diminishing returns rule isn’t applying here. In any case, this isn’t an example of throwing $30K into a clearly better component, which I was fully ready to accept as the only way to further improve it. This was simply tweaking around the edges and it making such an impact to get me this introspective about the process and the hobby.

Who knows, I’m planning on spending this rainy weekend delving into albums I haven’t heard in a long while or listening to tracks that don’t get as much love. Happy listening.

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FWIW, and again not a popular take, I’m with @M0N on the whole diminishing returns thing at least up to the levels of the systems I’ve listened to the differences as you step up to better gear are clear, though costs for the step do get bigger and bigger.

A lot of it is in how you listen, I do think audiophiles tend to listen to the technicalities of the presentation as much as to the music (I used to call it active listening), that is a “skill” (or curse depending on your viewpoint) and you do improve at it overtime.

Making an observation on myself and listening I will say that while I have what I think is very good recollection of systems, and for that matter various recordings I’ve heard going back even years. I do find that if I listen to something I haven’t heard for a while there is a tendency for me at least to remember the faults/weaknesses as being much greater in magnitude than they actually are when I listen again.

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Funny how we come up with these names for effectively the same idea. I call it deep listening. lol