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Anyone can be an Audiophile
Learn How Hunter Does It
The below text is a transcription of the video.
Audio files don’t have special genetics. They don’t have golden ears. They may well, however, have spent a lot longer than you did on developing their ability to hear into music. When somebody allegedly has great ears, we don’t mean that they can somehow hear up to, you know, 30,000 kilohertz or something. Listening is listening acuity. It’s a learned task. Like anything we do in life, the more you do it and the more you learn about a subject, the better you get at it. You know baseball and golf are probably the sports that respond most to technique. There are like 5,000 different touch points on technique that if you aspire to being a great baseball player or a great golfer, you have to get there. You get to a certain point and somebody goes, Hey, when you’re trying to make that play or make that shot, you have to do this and go, oh gosh, and you practice it four or 500 times until you start getting comfortable with that.
It’s like that with listening. So everybody is an audio file. I want to be right upfront about it. There is nobody that cannot hear this stuff. There is no magic bean that you have to eat in order to get blessed with great ears. It’s not that. So, what’s a good tip for doing it? One of the things that’s hardest for people is if they don’t know how to listen to music, I think the easiest thing for people to do this has nothing to do with the sub base. You can have no real in the system at all. Start trying to listen to the different pieces. If you like rock or pop, whatever, just try and find the baseline. My son’s been doing this. He’s home from college and he’s been listening to the baseline on great, you know, Motown songs and things and at first he couldn’t hear it at all and I started, I would hum it for him.
And suddenly, he was going, oh, okay. And now he can, we’re in the car, we’re driving along. Now he’s picking out the baseline. Why the baseline? Often, it’s the thing that on classic songs, made the song, there’s usually some twist. It is so easy to pick out after just a few minutes and it gives you insight on a song. And once you start realizing, you can hear different parts, different voices, you can hear backup singers, it starts to really deepen your appreciation of the music versus just following along with the melody. Alright, try and go a little bit deeper. When you go into a stereo store, a few tips. If the speakers, and this is true of any speaker above about $400 or $500 a pair, if they’re set up at like a meter and a half, four or five feet apart that’s not a credible setup.
Even a relatively small five and a quarter inch two-way is going to wind up being at least seven feet apart in order for the speakers to open up and not condense down on themselves. If you are in there and you’re experiencing that they’re set up very close together, pointed straight ahead, semi-close to the wall, and everything just sounds wooly. Get much closer to them. And I mean like within three to four feet of them, and you’ll hear everything start to open up. You may have to get down your hands and knees and crawl up to it, but go up there and hear them open up. And for the first time, you’ll actually start hearing what stereo is. Stereo is not two speakers squirting sound into each ear canal. It’s the way that all of those that combine into a three-dimensional sound field.
And so getting yourself closer will teach you a huge amount about what the speakers can do versus inep setup. Anyway, you guys can all do it. This is fun stuff. This is not difficult to hear. Just experiment, right? You want to have at a minimum an equilateral triangle. In most cases, most good modern speakers, the drivers we have these days are incredible. You probably want to be a little bit inside that. It’s more like a 72, 75 degree angle instead of a 60 degree. It will open things up, you’ll hear further into the sound stage. You’ll start to understand that term of the sound stage and it just makes the whole thing open up and be really involving. It draws you into the experience. You can absolutely do this. This is not something that only the wealthy can have.
In fact, I would say it’s easier to get great sound out of a $2,000 to $5,000 system than it is to get great sound out of a $200,000 to $500,000 system here all the time. It shows that’s hard to do, but a simple little system, even a little receiver, Yamaha makes some great receivers. Denon makes some great receivers, alright? Pair of inexpensive speakers start there. You know, once you get that mastered, add the matching sub. Once you get that mastered, get a better source. Everything you do to make the front end of it better will go all the way through your system and make the whole system better. So take your time. It’s a lot of fun. And try and find somebody who does know what they’re doing to coach you and mentor you. You know, oftentimes they’re really good guys at stores that are older that’ve done this for 20-30 years, and they’re usually really happy.
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