Audiophile Hearing Test

I have several friends who are audiophiles, with very high-end sound equipment in their homes. I have a better-than-average system in my home as well. We occasionally have music listening parties where everyone brings over new CDs (or DVDs or SACDs or DVD-Audios) to play selections from.

From years of hanging out with these folks, it has become clear to me that many people (including myself) simply do not have good enough hearing to appreciate some of the extreme subtleties in sound that these high end systems can reproduce. We’ve done side-by-side comparisons of higher fidelity against lower fidelity recordings. Sometimes others in the room will report they hear a clear difference, when I can detect little or none.

This makes me glad I didn’t spend 30 grand on my system, because it seems like the extra bit of fidelity that would have gotten me would probably be lost on my ears. (As in most product categories, there is a law of diminishing returns here, where the higher you go in the product line, the less linear the quality-to-cost ratio is). And from that comes my idea.

I propose a disk that has a number of pairs of recordings that are subtly different in quality, designed to test your ability to hear subtle differences in sound. This is not just a simple medical hearing test, which tests your ability to hear different levels and frequencies of sound. That maps out the edges of the envelope of your hearing. What we’re interested in are the surfaces and volume of that envelope.

You would rent this disk, and take it to a location with a very high-end system installed (such as an electronics store, or a friend's house) and play through the samples. For instance, a CD quality recording, followed by a DVD-Audio or SACD quality recording of the same fragment of music, followed by questions of whether you noticed specific differences. For instance: “How many trumpets did you hear in the sample?” “Could you hear the cowbell?”

The samples would be specifically designed to compare apples to apples, for instance it wouldn’t ask you to compare a stereo recording against a 5.1 surround recording, since obviously there are going to be differences there that go beyond simple fidelity. (That’s the problem with home-brewing a test like this; it is hard to find pairs of recordings that are simply different in fidelity but otherwise match. Usually there are other differences, such as the mix and level).

At the end, it would tell you approximately how much money you should spend on your receiver, speakers, etc. to take full advantage of your aural abilities, but not waste money reproducing sounds you can’t possibly appreciate.