"watch king" wrote in message ...


Now a comment on the idea of the "trained listener" that is being
bandied about. What does this mean? In my experience professional
recording engineers are trained listeners.

I'll go with that. Of course, as a professional recording engineer I
probably have a vested interest in agreeing with that! Plus, as an
undergrad 26 years ago I took two semesters of Listening & Analysis,
so perhaps I'm even more of a "trained listener" than most? Hey, I got
an A...

They really aren't any
better at listening testing than any other listeners and in some
circumstances they can have an incredible bias that makes them
useless as test listeners. In the circumstance that a recording
engineer has played a piece of music he is intimately familiar with,
through his own studio monitors, his preferences afterwards if that
recording is ever played is worthless. [snip]
They would be poor listening test subjects.
It would be no different for engineers who listened mostly on UREI
Time Aligns(Altec 604s), or any number of other JBL, Tannoy, Fostex,
Yamaha, Westlake or other studio monitors. These listeners just have
such huge built in listening biases that it would be difficult for
them to be objective about the "total quality" of one audio product
VS another in a blind listening test unless their loudspeakers and
facilites were used. These loudspeakers and facilites might never be
able to demonstrate a variety of audio characteristics.


Sorry, I must disagree with you here. In the first place, our job as
professional recording engineers starts with the capturing of a
musical event. If we're not intimately familiar with what the actual
live performance of that event sounds like...if we haven't gotten our
lazy asses out of the control booth and stood out there in the studio
or concert hall with the musicians and heard the actual sound coming
out of their instruments...then we're not really "professionals".
Fortunately, many of us are, and do. Our listening biases are based on
an intimate familiarity with live musical performance; *then* and only
then do we train ourselves how that sound translates through the
monitor speakers of choice.

Moreover, it strikes me as pointless to subjectively test audio
components for "total quality" in a wide open scenario such as you
imply, where one's familarity with some other audio playback system
would be considered the benchmark against which any variables would be
compared. What sort of information (other than very gross
generalizations) would you glean from *any* test which simply asks
"Which sounds better?" If you're going to leave the testing that wide
open at the very least A) subjects should be required to elaborate on
WHY one component sounds "better" (an explanation which, btw, I
believe professional recording engineers are usually well qualified to
offer), and B) subjects should be comparing to the benchmark of live
music.

It will take me a while to get through the rest of your entire post,
but this early paragraph caught my eye (ear?) & I wanted to respond to
it while the notion was fresh.