Critical Listening As Practicing

The equivalent to practicing, when we’re talking about loudspeakers, is critical listening – that intense focused analytical listening to recordings for the purpose of understanding their strengths, weaknesses and elements of style. So, if we are going to apply our “musical instrument” model to our selection of studio monitors, we are going to have to spend some time doing our critical listening with various loudspeakers that we think might be candidates for our particular new main studio monitor.

Let’s talk about what that might involve.

Listening Materials

The materials you use to audition loudspeakers are fairly important. You can make up a CD or a DAT containing these materials, and this will simplify things a lot.

Select up to 12 one-minute excerpts of music and voice, plus three different examples of pink noise. The music should be varied in style, and should include at least:

• 1 well-recorded classical orchestral excerpt, plenty loud
• 1 classical female vocal with piano, sustained and soft
• 1 loud rock and roll/metal excerpt
• 1 acoustic folk/pop excerpt, hopefully with really nice vocals
• 1 drum solo or excerpt including just acoustic drums and bass for a bit
• 1 solo classical piano
• 1 techno-pop excerpt with lots of ear candy

Some people like to have some spoken voice, both male and female.

Most of these should be well-known commercially successful recordings (ranging from Rage Against the Machine to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, for instance). It’s useful if the recordings are well-known for their recording craft (Steely Dan or Pink Floyd, for instance).

The noise excerpts should each be about a minute, and include

• the same pink noise signal trace sent to both channels at equal level;
• different (uncorrelated) pink noise signals sent to each channel at equal levels;
• the same pink noise signal trace sent to each channel at equal level, but with the polarity of the right channel inverted.

I’d suggest you set up the CD with indexing so you can jump around to the various selections quickly and easily as you wish.