Training my ears to hifi?

[Protek67]

For some reason, ever since starting my journey with blue lola's and a pure tube amp along with lossless high quality masters..... I seam to pick thing's out of music better. I am notorious for completely glossing over vocal's in song's, just listening to the sound of it all. However since dipping my toes in headfi.... I notice thing's even on my gaming headset and onboard audio, I may have never tuned into. Is this a placebo affect? I would say that maybe I have become more selective in my source content however I have had this happen while listening to typical pandora stations. Just a random thought.

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Could be placebo, could be that you are now paying more attention and training your ears. People with "golden ears" don't usually have actual physically superior ears, (at least, not much) most of it comes from training yourself to hear small differences.

 

[alexying]

I used to do a online test to distinguish the same clip from lossless and mp3, and the result was I can't tell the difference among 192k, 320, and lossless wav format. So just enjoy the music.

 

[Muinarc]

Sounds to me like you're just paying more attention to what you hear. Hearing is probably the sense that's most taken for granted by people. My friend's brother does post production sound for major movies and his saying is that audio is "50% of the experience but 1% of the budget". Shows where the studio thinks the priorities lie.

 

[rafo]

I used to do a online test to distinguish the same clip from lossless and mp3, and the result was I can't tell the difference among 192k, 320, and lossless wav format. So just enjoy the music.

This, unfortunately, but on the same ship here

 

[Zapp_Fan]

Sounds to me like you're just paying more attention to what you hear. Hearing is probably the sense that's most taken for granted by people. My friend's brother does post production sound for major movies and his saying is that audio is "50% of the experience but 1% of the budget". Shows where the studio thinks the priorities lie.

I think that's probably not a horrible mismatch though, professional video gear and production is way more expensive than comparable quality audio gear, and I say this as someone who is a bit of an audio partisan. If you just look at the cost of gear, it's quite hard to justify spending more than ~$10K on a microphone, but a $10K movie camera is close to the bottom end of the pro market. It takes 100s of people to do the CG for some films (which even then occasionally looks fake), where that would be far too many for the soundtrack, even if you had a full orchestra... etc.