This might seem a strange question. Yet many people consciously or unconsciously want to improve their audio systems. The point is simple, it is difficult for us to deliberately and consciously respond to weakness and faults in a system that we cant hear. Not hearing them in itself doesn’t necessarily not mean they aren’t present rather we didn’t notice them!
Ill provide an example from hearing a certain brand of speakers played via a CD and solid state amp. Vocals particularly on the higher notes sounded metallic and forced. They didn’t flow and also had a phenomenon that might be called cchhh , where its kind of like the human voice is almost spitting out sound around a ‘c’ an ‘h’. Recorded music need not sound like this, though its more than possible some listeners had normalised this and couldn’t notice this phenomenon.
What provides a foundation for system improvements is developing our listening ability and secondly how will evaluate what we notice, how able to describe and community what we notice. (For the act of communicating can help us clarify what we are noticing) . How is this done? It need not be a dry academic exercise. There is music that has been recorded to highlight characteristics of music and also the influence of music reproduction. If you have a LP player the JBL Sessions record is a worthwhile investment. The JBL test record is valuable as discussing how different instruments should sound, and flaws and limitation can and do negatively effect how a system reproduces them.
One invaluable aid is to listen to serval pieces of music you know well on different systems and focus on what sounds different. A stark example of this was several Pete Seeger Tracks recorded by Stevenvalve. What is noteworthy of Seeger’s singing style is he deliberately doesn’t singing the same way all the way through, even with the same phrase which is repeated he may sing it faster or more slowly or with a different pitch and emotional emotion rendering. On some systems this feature of Seeger may and can be lost entirely, its only having the invaluable opportunity to hear the same tracks backs to back on different systems to realize that holly cow he now sounds like he is singing the same way all the way through, all the nuances are lost!!! Does it matter, well sure you can still enjoy the song, yet it conveys a different meaning. Seeger varied the way he sang for a reason, so not reproducing this is a loss plain and simple.
Another example actually comes from tracks on an Alice Cooper LP. It happened to me by pure chance. I had an opportunity to listen to the system where I bought the LP, and played several tracks. As the system had several large sub-woofers there was no deficit in bass output. The surprise when going home, was how the bass was rendered so differently. And contrary to the opinion of some the bass can have an effect on how a song is experienced. What I noticed was the there were bass notes playing that weren’t evident before, not was timing of the bass inform indeed drive rest of the music. Didn’t this difference matter? Well the bass drove the mood of the songs, so the things that weren’t happening did influence the emotional transference of the song. My biggest shock was just how differently the songs sounded due to the vastly different ability of the other system to render the bass parts of the song. This was a revelation to me as I had not realized previously how much the bass reproduction can matter for some songs.
It is worth listening to other systems, particularly good ones to gauge where your own is in the scheme of things. The effort can be worthwhile for if you can identify things that may not be ideal then you can at least consider whether you want to address then or not.
There will be those who accept third rate reproduction because they didn't notice it. The reality is no one, even the person with one of the best performing systems in the world, started out noticing everything! While it's wishful thinking to think that we all have and will have the same capacities to listen and notice, we can share and even enjoy the evaluative journey. This can be a collaborative journey rather than a point scoring one, we don’t need always accept all feedback about our systems, yet it might help us notice what we overlooked and then decide whether we are happy to live with this perceived limitation or not.
If you ask those that do have excellent systems I suspect many of them will say that they exceeded their expectations of what a hi-fi system could deliver. Being able to listen well is I suspect not coincidental to them having an excellent system. Luck and high-quality equipment still only get you so far (yet that’s another topic in its own right).
