March 2026

High Fidelity And The Difference Between Listening And Hearing
The real reason we have our high-fidelity music sound systems.
Editorial By Roger Skoff

  What does "listening" mean to you?

Is it something active or passive? Is sound – including music – just part of life's background, or is it something special, something that holds your attention and that you meet with intent and focus?

Given the near-constant flow of noise in our lives – music in every imaginable form, from singing commercials to the music at work, in the office, or in a store (never meant to be listened to at all, but simply to create an upbeat mood), to "elevator" music, to the background music for movies or television, to the "bumper" music for news broadcasts – almost all of us are surrounded by sound nearly all the time, none of which we actively listen to and little of which we actually hear. Even in a seemingly "quiet" room at home, the measured background noise level will usually measure somewhere around 55 dB.

What that means is that, for most of you reading Enjoy the Music.com, sound – any kind of sound, including music – is simply something that's there: part of life's constant backdrop. And, instead of listening to it, our minds filter most of it out so thoroughly that, even though it's present, we don't really hear it at all.

Most of the time, that's a good thing, but when we sit down in our listening room and actually want to give our attention to the music our system is making, those filters can become a real obstacle to enjoyment.

To illustrate what I'm saying, illustrated below, think about this: (Or better yet, try it at home on your own system.) When a musician (it doesn't matter whether jazz, pop, or classical) plucks a note on a string bass, there are actually three distinct sounds produced: First is the sound of the pluck itself. Second is the sound of that pluck traveling along the string and through the bridge into the body of the instrument. Third is the sound of the full resonance of the instrument's body as it picks up and amplifies the pluck's energy. If a piece of music includes a pizzicato (plucked) bass note – very common in every musical style – and you don't hear all three sounds – pluck, spread, and bloom – then either something's wrong with your system or the sounds are there and, like many other people, you're simply filtering them out and not noticing them.

You're listening, but not hearing.

And that's a shame. Music is one of life's great joys, and hi-fi – the way we bring it into our homes or wherever we want to enjoy it – ought to be the conveyor of that joy to our ears, our bodies, and maybe even our dancing feet.

Isn't that what our hobby is really all about?

What makes all this so important is that the difference between hearing and listening isn't just academic; it's the difference between music being something that just happens around us and something that happens to or even with us. When we sit down in front of our system – and it doesn't even have to be an expensive one – we want to be able to hear not just the sound, but the message of the music. And that's conveyed in many ways, often so subtle that, unless we know how to really listen – to set aside the filters that we've set up for all our lives – that may never fully happen.

Anthony Cordesman, who used to review high-end audio gear, often used a listening panel to help with his findings. And on that panel, he regularly had people whose hearing was known to be limited. The point there being that it's not "Golden Ears" that are required to pick up all that the music has to offer, but the knowledge of how to listen.

Music is more than just the notes played. A great part of it is not the notes at all, but the level at which they're played or the silences between them, and a few dB or a few milliseconds of difference can change the sound or the mood of a piece entirely. (That's why I have multiple performances of pieces like the Shostakovich Symphony No. 15 or Vivaldi's The Four Seasons – every performance is the same notes played in a different manner, and they're all worth listening to!)

Besides dynamics and timing, there are other things that can make an important difference – not by themselves, but simply by how you listen to them: One perfect example in a "pop" genre is "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees. I've been hearing that song for nearly fifty years, since it first came out in 1977, without ever actually knowing – other than the chorus – what the words were. They were never important to me, so I simply never bothered to listen. Finally, last night, when I heard them as part of the background to a particularly funny scene in the 1980 movie "Airplane", I actually heard them for the first time, and wow!

"How you listen can be fully as important
as what you listen to, and can make the difference
between just hearing something and fully enjoying it."

Most importantly, learning to listen is something anybody can do: The first and most essential thing is to understand that listening isn't automatic, isn't something that just happens to you, but that it's something you do.  When you can do that, the entire experience of music changes. It stops being wallpaper and starts being a world. It stops being just a stream of pleasant noises and becomes a conversation between you and the musicians, between intention and perception, between what they meant and what you're finally able to receive. And the miracle is that none of this requires better ears, younger ears, or "Golden Ears." Only the decision to pay attention.

Once you make that decision – once you sit down, abandon all the filters and preconceptions, and actually hear what you're listening to – the music opens itself up in ways that feel almost like magic.  You start noticing the way a singer shapes the end of a phrase, how a drummer leans just a fraction of a beat ahead to create tension, and how a violinist lets a note bloom just a hair longer than expected, to give the music a whole new meaning. You start hearing the room the musicians were in, the air around the instruments, the choices behind the performance. You start hearing the why, not just the what of the music. And suddenly the system you thought you knew – the one you may have listened to for years – sounds new again, not because it has changed, but because you have.

That's the real secret of our hobby, my dear music-loving friends reading Enjoy the Music.com, as it's the one no manufacturer can sell you and that no reviewer can measure: From the standpoint of enjoyment, it's the greatest upgrade you can ever make. Better gear can reveal more, but what's the point unless you're prepared to hear it? A modest system listened to with open ears will always give you more music than even a great system that's just background noise. Listening is the key that unlocks the value of everything else.

Once you've experienced that – once you've had that moment where a familiar piece suddenly reveals a flash of feeling you never knew was there, or where a song you've heard a thousand times finally tells you what it's been saying all along – you'll understand why we build our systems.

Now that you know, pick something you want to hear, turn on your system, sit back, close your eyes, and... 

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff