Okay here's the story:
About a year ago my mother had a contractor remodel her basement (it previously had a concrete floor, walls, and exposed fiberglass). One day I walked in and saw these bullet-like capsules on the ground. It turns out that they were black powder filled cartridges used for his rivet gun to put nails in the concrete because after accidentally smashing one with a hammer, I could barely hear anything for hours! Did you ever see a WW2 movie where a grenade explodes near the main character and everything he hears is very muted and slow? Well that what happened to me. It wasn't until I got into the audiophile world that I realized I hear a constant ringing in my ears, something called Tinnitus incase you didn't know. After coping with tinnitus for almost a year, I have gotten used to it and I almost forget that it is there. I mostly recognize it when I go to sleep, wear headphones with no music playing, or stay in a place where it is completely silent.
the problem is that when I try to concentrate on my music and attempt to observe it and enjoy it, the high pitched ringing that I hear really annoys me and I find it very difficult to enjoy my music. Also, when I attempt to distinguish the sound quality of headphones, I can only tell who has punchier bass. When I took 5 pairs of headphones (Apple ADDIEM's, Skullcandy Titan's, Etymotic HF3's, some cheap Samsung headphones that came with a bluetooth headset, and Skullcands Ink'd), I could not tell the difference. I did experience a different sound from each of them, the HF3's my favorites for the crisp and clean sound they gave but I could not describe it.
I could not tell which pair had better mids, highs, treble, or which headphones had warmer sound because I do not know what to look for in the sound when I listen to the headphones. Also, a lot of people say that the difference between 128kbps MP3's and 320kbps MP3's is day and night however I cannot tell the difference at all. So basically I am asking you guys to literally teach me how to hear, to teach me where the mids are in my music, to tell which pair of headphones sounds warmer, and to teach me where to look for in music that will allow me to distinguish between high bit-rate MP3's and low bit-rate MP3's.
Also, my sources for the audio were:
A sansa Clip+ (rockboxed), A 4th generation iPod Touch, A samsung Galaxy S Vibrant, and the onboard sound car in my computer.
