So apparently Jordi is some kind of professional musician.  I find it is very interesting that I have met a lot of professional musicians and have seen a few post comments on this website.  Does anyone else notice that their preference in audio playback seems very idiosyncratic?  Usually it is a mix of mid-fi and hi-fi stuff that seems like a weird combination. 

I wonder if it because they have trained to play instruments so they learn to listen for very specific things that have to do with playing instruments and then shape the stereo set around magnifying those elements?

To me their systems always sound kind of strange.  My analogy is that I might hear a duck quacking and then the musician's setup is more like you have grabbed a hold of the duck and really squeezed it to make it loudly quack this kind of strangled frenzied cry, and they say to me "Listen to how clear the quacking sounds!"  Well, this sounds actually mean, and I don't intend it that way.  I am just saying I think they are listening for very specific things and it all sounds kind of foreign to me.

To be clear, my girlfriend plays in the local symphony and also has a jazz band she leads.  So I have nothing against musicians!  SOmetimes, when I had changed my stereo, she would say "Yes, I can hear the difference, but I don't care!"  Interestingly, when she recorded her last album, I helped her to mix it.  I swore the engineer had some distortion on this track she recorded, but he said "No" and nobody else heard this on the studio monitors.  Well, we played the demo on my home stereo and sure enough it became very obvious to everyone.  Then we had to take the CD to get re-mastered to try and sort of hide the damage of the distortion, actually to Paul Stubblebine (he is good friends with Mr. Bottlehead) but this is another story...

Paul S wrote:

I thought it was a garden variety truism, if not the truth, that musiicians typically "make do" with - whatever - in the way of hi-fi...

Paul S wrote:

Although we "should" demand "the same thing" from hi-fi that we seek from live music, I would not be surprised if it turns out that musicians are simply able to "get more" from any given playback system.  How can musicians not hear differently than the musically challenged?

Paul S wrote:

I do not mean to be a critical listener all the time, but I have to admit that I have a critical element at work much of the time when I listen, not just to hi-fi but also to live music.  Now that I think of it I guess my hi-fi listening habits carried over to live listening.

mats wrote:

Do you mean that the musicians reconstruct the music in accordance with their memory, or knowledge of the piece?  Or even their opinion of how it "should" sound?

I do not think that memory or knowledge has anything to do with it. Sure the memory or knowledge are more developed with musicians but it is not important for audio subjects. There is a difference between musical knowledge and musical understating. Musical knowledge is a great thing but it has little application to audio. The musical understating is more beneficial but it is not necessarily higher developed among musicians. The knowledge of the driven musical peace is very overrated. How many times you heard a new peace that you never heard before and recognized that it was badly played, not technically badly but musically badly? Instead of knowledge I would vote for an evolved understanding….

Bud wrote:

Check out what this musician has to say about the problem. http://www.performancerecordings.com/capturing-music.html

… unfortunately this article has some, from my point of view, “issuers”. The author advocates needs to build but better audio in order to make audio better. I disagree with this approach. I feel that better audio comes from evolvement of listening consciousness and a better audio will just organically flow out from the consciousness’ progress. Also, the author advocated a vertical partition of musical idea. I very much degree with it and in my view the musical ideas has strictly horizontal nature. I wonder what would be the outcome of Mr. Boyk if he would play with my concept of listening re-composition of played back material.

Anyhow, with some minor exceptions it is an excellent article. Still this article is hardly presents an emblematic musicians point of view on audio as Mr. Boyk is rather audio–anomaly among typical musicians.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Mr. Boyk is rather audio–anomaly among typical musicians.

Well, I have to agree with this.  I guess you do not publish an article of some point of view that is very obvious to everyone.

Romy the Cat wrote:

I do not think that memory or knowledge has anything to do with it...Instead of knowledge I would vote for an evolved understanding….

Romy the Cat wrote:

I always was under observation that musicians use different techniques - they do not listen played back music but they rather register the pointers to keys and intervals and then they reconstruct in their consciousness the fabric of the music in accordance with their perception. I am not a musician, in fact I have no good music abilities at all (I can’t hear myself) but I do use these listening techniques sometimes. The caT