Steve Guttenberg on how to approach listening to music

Original author: Steve Guttenberg
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In our discussions on GT, we love to build on expert opinions, one of which is Steve Guttenberg. We recently talked about the old new high definition sound and discussed dynamic range compression.

Today we decided to look at how Steve suggests approaching listening to music.


It seems that hearing is a purely mechanical process, but as soon as you concentrate, you will begin to hear much more.

Indeed, today we are very exposed to the risk of manipulation - sometimes we do not quite understand what we can trust. For example, Steve himself criticizes excessive attention to the technical characteristics of acoustics. We discussed this topic with Yuri Fomin in one of the issues of our podcast.

Of course, there are other options: trusting a particular brand / manufacturer or choosing through personal listening in showrooms. You can pay a little more attention to the conditions in which you listen to music, look at their features and even take the acoustics to your home listening .

Yuri Fomin in the release of the podcast " Opinion of an engineer: How to create your own ecosystem of sound ":
There is no perfect sound in any system, for any money. There will definitely be distortions. How many distortions will there be, in what harmony will they be with the environment? In accordance with this, the preferences of the listener are formed.

I propose this approach: grow with the environment, that is, buy what you can afford so that this technique satisfies your “milestone” tasks, and deal with a product that is “accompanied”, that is, grow with you

Steve Guttenberg on how to approach the understanding of the world of sounds in which we live:
To get started, sit in a room where nobody is there, turn off all the electronics, close your eyes and listen to the “silence”. What do you hear? Cars on the street, clock ticking, a refrigerator in the kitchen at the other end of the apartment?

We can easily recognize where the sound is coming from. Our ancestors relied on keen hearing to prepare for battle or flight from danger - this was a matter of life and death.

If you concentrate and listen in the city, you will recognize the quiet rustling of rotating fans, the noise of vehicles, the electric hum of lights - this is the basis on which other sounds are superimposed



Yuri Fomin about how the organization of your living space can have:
From a young age, my children listened to music through professional studio headphones, which at that time were the most “top-end”, cool. They began to understand this very well.

One is now an expert in the field of sound technology assessment, the other is very close to this. I did nothing, I just created the environment. If a person realizes that he doesn’t buy the equipment for his beloved personally, but creates a living environment, a measure appears to assess the adequacy of the opportunity.

What Steve thinks about it:
Music should evoke feelings and emotions, which is facilitated by good musical equipment. There is one problem with good audio systems - it’s hard to stop listening.

They make it easier to focus on individual parts of the composition: you clearly hear the artist and each instrument. In good headphones, it seems to you that the music sounds right in your head - excellent headphones can create the effect of a remote sound, as if it goes from the outside of the device (with some recordings).

To listen is to be careful, the more you listen, the more you hear. However, the converse is also true.

Indeed, only a specific person can say that he likes or dislikes a particular sound. If we talk about the choice of acoustics, you can only tell him the way - understanding how he can learn and raise his cultural level in relation to the theme of sound.

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