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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Musicians' ear
Post Subject: Musicians' earPosted by drdna on: 8/24/2007

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...

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