Audio Federation - Don't Panic! - Recipes for a Successful Audiophile

Audio System Evaluation Techniques
Using The Ears

Listening

Easier said than done, listening involves time, concentration, and sometimes the hardest of all, lack of concentration.

There are a number of ways to listen, all of which can help form the basis for one's opinion about the quality of the sound of a particular system.
It can take weeks of evaluation to compare high-quality systems. High-quality systems have such high quality audiophile attributes that one can evaluate them based almost completely on their emotional impact, realism, and communication ability (i.e. the system is quite good and not lacking an obvious attribute or does not have an overriding annoying attribute that causes it to be ruled out).

It can take only seconds to rule out a low quality system - the differences from the desired sound are often immediately apparent.

Some ways to listen are:
1. Listening carefully to the audiophile qualities of the sound
  
  This means listening for the quality with respect to things like:
  1. Details; bass, midrange, and highs. Are they natural or blurred or etched? Are they of a whole or are they disparate? Do they flow nicely into each other? Do some details seem to stick out more than others?
  2. Notes; bass, midrange, highs. Is the note envelope natural or does it rise too quickly and sound etched; does it fall too quickly without the natural harmonics; does it rise too slowly, sounding soft; does it fall too slowly, sounding syrupy. Does it rise too high, with too much bloom; or does is get truncated, without the natural bloom of real music.
  3. Harmonics, the tonality: do the notes, especially voices, sound 'on key' or are they off a little; do they sound right throughout the frequency range; do they sound right during the start, middle and trailing off of the notes
  4. Micro-dynamics: do small notes, parts of notes, variations in notes sound clear and rise and fall in a natural manner or do they sound muffled or are not present at all.
  5. Midi-dynamics: do ordinary notes start, achieve their natural volume and trail off in a realistic, uncompressed manner or do they sound muffled (currently no speaker does a very good job at this though horn speakers and OTL (output transformer-less) amplified speakers are the best).
  6. Macro-dynamics: do large dynamic swings, very loud notes or passages against a quiet background sound powerful and clear or somewhat muffled and muted;
  7. PRaT (pacing, rhythm, and timing): does the music make you want to tap your foot or get up and dance or is it kind of slow and plodding and/or sounds like it is being played too fast or at varying speeds
  8. Soundstage; on stereo recordings...is the soundstage nice and wide (stretching at least from speaker to speaker) or it everything clustered in the center; is it deep and multi-layered or does it sound flat; is it spread out more or less naturally from left to right, or is everything clustered in the center and at the left and right speakers
  9. Imaging; do the instruments and voices stay in one place in the soundstage or do they move around when they play different notes or at different volumes; do these seem like solid, substantial entities in the soundstage or are they wispy and fading in and out; do the instruments and voices seem distinct from each other, or are they kind of melded together;
  10. Complex music passages: do complex musical passages (more than 5 instruments/voices at one time) sound like each note is present or does it sound like a mish-mash wall of sound with all the notes blurred together
  11. Frequency extremes: does the bass have lots of detail or does it just sound like a dull 'throb'; does the bass decay naturally or just end abruptly; does the bass have some slam or does it just kind of arrive
  12. Sweet spot:: the width and height; the characteristics of the change as one leaves the sweet spot (or even as one moves ones head from left to right)
  13. Integration: does the bass, midrange and highs all seem like they are coming from the same musicians or does it seem like there are too many players on stage; Does the bass, midrange, and highs of each note start at the same time and decay together, or do some notes seem to be unnaturally generated ahead of the others.
2. Listening to the emotional qualities the sound imbues in oneself
  
  This means determining how the music affects you, and this will be, of course, different for different kinds of music. Well reproduced music will indeed have an emotional impact - it will have an impact without any effort on the part of the listener.
  Positive emotional impact:
  1. Adrenaline rush: does exciting music cause you to feel excited, exuberant and ready to take on the world
  2. Dance: does dancing music cause you to (want to) get up and dance, does it make you smile
  3. Ballads: do ballads cause you to feel sad or cry
  4. Beauty: does beautiful music fill you with the wonder of the universe, the human spirit, of human ingenuity
  Negative emotional impact:
  1. Headache: does the music cause tightness in the neck, irritability, headaches
  2. Loudness: do you want to keep turning the volume down
3. Listening casually to the qualities of the sound
  
  This means being in either the same room with the system or a different room, and doing another task such as light reading or conversation. In this context does the sound:
  1. Keep grabbing your attention and drawing you into the music
  2. Have correct harmonics
  3. Keep grabbing your heart strings (a very good sign during this test)
4. Listening to the truth of the sound
  1. To add (2/12/2006)
5. Listening to the message of the sound
  1. To add (2/12/2006)
6. Paying attention to the realms where the sound takes you.
  1. To add (2/12/2006)
Be sure to test with lots of different kinds of music: your favorites that you know by heart, music you hate, good recordings, bad recordings, even unfamiliar music.
Evaluating a component (evaluating changes made to a system)

There are four things to listen to here: the audible change to the system sound as the change is made, the system with the change, the audible change to the system sound as the change is removed, and the system without the change.
1. Make the change to the system
  How does it sound? What are your initial impressions? This evaluation is only of marginal use as changes often have to 'settle in', warm up, or one's ears have to get used to the changes, especially those that are very subtle or very dramatic.
2. Live with the change as long as is feasible
  How does the sound evolve over time - does it cause headaches or can it be listened to for long periods of time. How does it feel like the audiophile qualities have changed? What qualities have changed for the better? What qualities have changed for the worse? Over many hours, does it still sound like improvements have been made?
3. Remove the change from the system
  How does it sound now? What are your initial impressions? Is this familiar sound welcomed back? Or does it make one wonder how one ever thought that this sounded good?
4. Live with the old system if possible
  If you can do this, and live with the old system, then maybe the change wasn't so awesomely tasty after all.
Problems that may be encountered
1. Great components often expose problems in the rest of the system
  This will cause the introduction of great components to make your system sound worse
2. The effect of great components may not be able to be heard in a system
  The sound of a component is dependent on the signal being fed it by the other components. For example the component may be capable of very detailed rendering, but the rest of the system may not be able support this level of detail (the details may be hidden by cables and/or components that are too noisy or are just not capable of generating or passing through such subtle details) .