Sure, there will be some musicians who are in to audio.
You may have read this book. Haruki Murakami, besides being one of the greatest Japanese writers, is a jazz officiando and ran a jazz club for many years, is a good friend of Seiji Ozawa and when Ozawa was ill they did a series of discussions on music. They listened mostly to classical recordings, a few jazz. You can google Murakami’s system, it seems based on a pair of Tannoy HPD’s perhaps 40 or 50 years old.
The insight and depth of perception from Ozawa in particular (although Murakami’s knowledge of classical music and classical recordings is very impressive) about the type of sound from various orchestras, and sections of orchestras, is extraordinary. These are two world class listeners, but it’s all about the music and not the audio system. Tannoy HPD’s are great speakers, but they’ve been around since before high end audio existed.
This book is as good as any you could ever read about listening to music.
I just saw the article you posted. . enjoyed looking at it and
seeing he had an Accuphase E407 integrated amp …to
drive his Tannoys…excellent gear…knew where to put his $$$$!!
In was at Harman back in the day and went through the training by Floyd and Dr. Thiel. It was very interesting and surprising how many pre conceived notions I had that were wrong and my inability to differentiate multiple tones at different sound levels. The training lasted about 60hrs across 4 months with multiple tests with results feedback and cross references. Funny the training made me verrrry critical of most headphones due to the compressed dynamics.
Sure… I was a development / manufacturing engineer and thought I knew my stuff. Young, good hearing, loved music and could absolutely pick out on/off pitch and flat/sharp and a 20kHz tone… NOT. Rude awakening learning you can’t differentiate a crossover slope of a simple 2 way system that well you designed the previous week. Very humbling when the trainers could listen to a system and immediately say it’s 1.5db down between x & y frequencies with a hump at z of about 2db. After did learn quite a lot on how to understand harmonics, dynamics, and tonal qualities. However I use the “tinear” handle for a reason. I do know what I like even though now these many years later my ears are not what they once were when Floyd got done with us.
I’m currently a Music Therapy student (2nd Bachelor’s) at Colorado State University and am doing TONS of ear training. We must to be able to identify chords, inversions, solfege, harmonic intervals, and much more. My professors say that even pro musicians lose it without practice, which is very easy to believe. There is definitely ear training in academia. 3rd inversion of a diminished 7th chord anyone? I’m not even talking about more advanced jazz chords.
Also, I’ve seen many people here, including Paul say that professional musicians don’t care about hifi. While that may apply to the hifi business that sits on shelves, I think we can all easily agre that musicians care (in an obsessed audiophile kind of way) about their instrument’s sound. That’s super related to SQ, so the argument fails on that front IMHO.
Steven Isserlis says, to anyone who will listen, that if the Royal Academy who own his ‘Marquis de Coberon’ Stradivarius cello take it away from him, he will kill himself. Thankfully he is still alive.
Not only care, those of us who perform are obsessed with our sound.
In addition to ear training, I assume you are doing good deal of sight singing, etc. which also require a trained ear.
A skill I have, unintentionally developed, is hearing music and instantly knowing the fingerings on my primary instrument for each note I hear without conscious thought. I assume this is common among instrumentalists. I need to remember to ask my colleagues.
I’ve never been a professional musician, but I’ve played more than a hundred paid gigs on the electric bass.
The reason musicians aren’t into hifi is that they’re into music gear! And most musicians are pretty poor, okay? You can’t sell a CD any more, nobody really goes out to shows, and anyone can stream your most recent album for a penny. Musicians are dreaming about scoring a $75 deal on a used pedal, or once a year they lust about a $750 guitar or a $500 amp.
A $300 power cord or a $3000 amp just isn’t in the cards; it would mean you get no new music gear for a couple of years!
That said, yes! Being in a band, being a musician, is training your brain to track multiple musical lines at the same time. And that, to me, is what deep or trained listening is about: can you follow, for example, the brushwork on the snare, the beat subdivisions by the acoustic rhythm guitar, and the telecaster lead fills, all at the same time? Can you comprehend a counterpoint between the trumpet and sax on top of all that?
For me, I love the two sides of the coin: playing music with others, and listening to music by others (who are way better at it than I.) For most musicians, there’s just not enough money to enjoy both sides of that coin.
Perfect Pitch - This kid is amazing. There are several more vids by Rick Beato about perfect pitch, relative pitch and how his kid developed this level and how adults can’t develop perfect pitch. Pretty amazing.
Beato also does some great videos on “what makes this song great” where he tears down (mostly rock) songs into isolated tracks, analyzes them, breaks them down into chords, scales & such. Kinda like grade 8 english class when you tore down a novel into its individual parts. Very cool stuff. He’s shown me new things in the background of tunes I’ve known for 45 years.
