Do reviewers and "golden ears" with a recording background have an advantage?

[Alan Sircom]

I don't subscribe to the 'golden ears' concept. A listener is a listener is a listener. With a lot of experience in critical listening, the skill set becomes more attuned and nuanced, in the same way that a wine taster's nose and palette become more attuned and nuanced over time. This does not mean their nose and tastebuds improve over time, but rather their ability to put those trained senses to good use and to consistently recognise wines that would taste functionally identical to the neophyte. Yes, there are always outliers; bat-eared types who retain the hearing acuity of an eight year old into their dotage and people who spent their formative years in front of The Who's PA system. Most of us are toward the middle of the bell-curve.

Intuitively, I'd say having a recording or musical background is an advantage to reviewing audio equipment. Certainly there are a lot of musicians (especially guitarists, it seems) who write about audio. However, a musician's ear training has little in common with the ear training required by a studio engineer (the former might place emphasis on musical interval, the latter on EQ), and an audiophile's training program (like the one developed by Harman) should be geared toward audio-specific aspects such as identifying system-related coloration, and I'm not sure how relevant the training in one discipline would be to the others. I don't think cross-platform skills would necessarily be a hinderance, unless the individual was so tied to one kind of ear training as to render them useless in all others (e.g., a musician who thinks that, because their training was all about being able to tell one note is two full tones higher than another without having to sing the Do-Re-Mi song from The Sound of Music to themselves, musical interval is the only currency in recorded music).

Knowledge is power though, and having an understanding of the nature of the instruments being played and how the sound of those instruments is shaped by the studio process is extremely useful knowledge for an audio reviewer.

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

Alan - what about a record reviewer?

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

The best equalizer I owned was the Cello Audio Palette MIV. Although it was a lot of fun, when I realized that I was spending more time turning dials that listening to the music I decided to sell it!

Now that's a good reason to get eq out of your system. I've had a few varieties of EQ. I find it amusing. Until it becomes annoying. But I can't say it ever effected "depth," personally.

Tim

 

[Alan Sircom]

Alan - what about a record reviewer?

Not an easy question. Again, an understanding from the position of a musician and/or a studio engineer is useful, but more as 'related' interest rather than directly useful to the task in hand. There's a good argument to say a music review should be akin to a write up of the experience of a knowledgable and enthusiastic concert goer (with a concert program in their hand for the back story), and the most qualified person to write a review reflects that.

The musician and studio backgrounds are useful to help describe what's on the recording, but most seem to go for reviews of the art than reviews of what went on to make the art happen. Audio magazine music reviews do have a greater focus on the process and how that shapes the end result ("The guitar sound is well-balanced and slightly 'flubby', giving it a 1950s vibe."), but this is often more to do with the names and the ephemera ("The guitar sound is well-balanced and slightly 'flubby', giving it a 1950s vibe. It was recorded using AKG and Royer microphones into a John Hardy preamp.") rather than anything deeper ("The engineer used a variation of Steve Albini's 'light/dark' mix, using an AKG C414-XLS condenser mic – set to hypercardioid – and a Royer Labs R121 ribbon mic into a John Hardy M-1 microphone preamp to record the guitar amplifier. The two mics were placed about 12" from the amp, but were set away from the acoustic center of the amplifier's loudspeaker cone to create that well-balanced, slightly 'flubby' sound reminiscent of the 1950s."). The last is more detailed, but is possibly TMI for most readers, who just want to know what the music is like, and how it sounds.