It's no secret that evaluating audiophile hardware - and sharing the experience - is very difficult and contentious. I am still fascinated by the variety of views on IEM's (my personal main fix for music due to my schedule, living arrangements, and history with IEM's as stage monitoring devices) for instance - how people claim wildly varying sound profiles for the exact same hardware.
Listening through my new SE353's I noticed that a key element of the listening experience is often neglected, even though it is a key element for the enjoyment of sound: listening as an intentional act of the mind.
We often pretend that the experience of music is an objective one, that somehow, if only you had the best hardware, you should automatically get the best music experience. That's an unsurprising attitude given our consumer culture, but it also gets the reality of the sensory and experiential (or for the liberal arts types among you - phenomenological) experience wrong.
Listening to music is an active process. We hear the sounds, but we decode them, consume them, enjoy them only in a more or less active process. I sometimes find myself in a hurry, listening to music just in the background. Invariably, in those moments, I tend to turn up the volume and tend to favor hardware that is less flat, more bassy, more rich. I want the hardware to make up for my lack of mindful attention.
The again, when I truly have time and pay attention to the music, actively participate in its unfolding, I prefer more balanced hardware, because I want to be able to experience the music differently every time by shifting my attention and awareness between the various instruments, voices, etc.
I think we could liken this difference to reading the news on the Huffington Post or Drudge Report (the content doesn't matter - the form does) versus a plain news reader like Instapaper or even just a plain text file. In the former, we rely on the presentation to pre-process the source for us when we are not interested in investing a lot of attention and processing into decoding the meaning - when we want to consume mindlessly. In the latter case, a mindful experience is necessary.
So, perhaps we should add a new dimension to both hardware evaluation and listening education: the mindfulness with which we plan on enjoying the music. There's nothing wrong with a set of headphones for keeping you good company as you work and can't pay attention. But much disappointment would be spared if people weren't expecting such a 'listening aid' from hardware that's only supposed to offer you a canvas for your own explorations.
Similarly, I think the audiophile community pays too little attention to teaching the art of listening, and educating people who want more out of their music about how to do it - buying a Ferrari doesn't make you Michael Schumacher, buying an expensive golf club doesn't make you Tiger Woods... We should emphasize that listening is an active process, something that can be learned as well.
