The Hifi Podcast: Top 5 Ways To Improve Your Listening Skills

“Hmmm. I’m used to more weight on the center vocal on this track, and there’s a little too much 10KHz going on here than I like.”

If this sounds like something you’ve said before, there’s a good chance you’ve spent a bit of time working on your listening skills, which is one of the most important elements of being an audiophile.

If you do enough listening and evaluating, you realize that “Golden Ears” has nothing to do with actual ears. It’s about everything between the ears, and it’s a claim you can make only after years of listening experiences uploaded into that gray matter.

With listening, practice makes perfect. You must actively work to expose yourself to different presentations, and you need to build the necessary lexicon to organize audio-centric thoughts and reactions.

Audio descriptors like “warm” or “clinical,” or terms like “inner detail” or “fluid” are not just used to communicate your thoughts to others — they’re also useful to categorize and archive the observations for yourself.

From presenting your ears with different audio systems, to actually recording and manipulating audio, in this podcast episode Darren and Duncan offer tips and steps you can take to help you develop your own golden ears.

Early on in the podcast, the guys also answer more listener questions and bring up a couple of hifi audio news items. At the end, another sizzler of an album recommendation is revealed.

More info at www.thehifipodcast.net.