Artifacts In The Recording

[agent_kith]

Some will find this exercise pointless, what's the point of hearing all these little background noises? Knowing what they are will help you make changes to improve your system (and yourself).

And it's via the following four ways: 

1. Improve your active listening skills: Allowing you to hear, analyse and appreciate music better. If you like listening to Jazz this is an essential skill. As your active listening improve, you'd be better at picking up all the "interplays" (think of it as 'flirting') between the musicians.
   
2. Improve your system by lowering the noise floor: A lot of these details are masked from you because the system is not resolving enough. People hate to admit this, but resolution is a problem in digital playback and personally I find these artifacts are the best tools for me to objectively gauge the resolution of an audio system.
   
3. Improve your system by enhancing imaging: Playback is all about physics and mechanics, but the field of psychoacoustics is the only field I am aware of that harmogenise physics, mechanics and music into a collective fold. Focusing on the psychoacoustics aspect (think of focusing your system around the idea of what you can hear vs what your system can reproduce) is a very reliable way to tune your system.
   
4. Tools for auditioning: Wanna spend mega bucks on gear? These are the obvious tracks to test the resolving capability of the gear you're lusting.
   

And now the album that started all this, Ray Charles - Genius Loves Company. Track #7, It Was A Very Good Year.
After Willie Nelson sang "When I was 35", at around the 2:12 timestamp, you'd hear a noise in the back of the sound stage to your left. This sounds like a person sneezing. Note where the point source of the noise, and how far back this is in the background.



This track by far is the easist track to identify, and yet over the years I realised: 

1. Some system is not resolving enough to play this noise, and
   
2. Even when a system is good enough, nobody can hear this