Submitted by West-Cheek-156 t3_11cpf4g in headphones
The_D0lph1n t1_ja4uz1p wrote
Reply to comment by [deleted] in How do I listen for "detail" in music? by West-Cheek-156
You might find what I call "old-school audiophile" reviews better in some circumstances then, as many of them include stuff like "I put on [specific song] and the saxophone was deeper and richer, but the trumpet sounded a bit flat and lacking brilliance". Brent Butterworth (who used to write for SoundstageSolo!) did his written reviews like this, where he went through a bunch of songs and described what he heard in each on the headphone being reviewed. He then extrapolated the FR features from there, like "the bass guitar was more prominent in this track than when played on [other headphone], so I suspect there is an elevation in the upper bass." He also did measurements (after writing the entire review, so that his listening wasn't biased by seeing the measurement).
Other people don't like that style of review, because they don't see the relevance of those impressions if they don't listen to the same songs as the reviewer. So they prefer the Crin/Resolve method of describing sound in general terms, like "mids are honky", "bass is muddy", "there's good/bad detail retrieval". The downside of that style of review is that sounds and perceptions have to be described in somewhat general and vague terms.
Another problem with the first, "old-school" style is that it gets very verbose, very fast. When the whole script of the review has to fit within a 10-minute YouTube video, there's no time to describe all of the examples of where an acoustic feature is present while also including stuff about build and comfort.
I've recently started gravitating towards that "old-school" style because even if I'm not familiar with the tracks the reviewer is using, they're almost always just a Spotify search away, I can discover new music in the process, and I can better understand what a reviewer means in a description (learn the jargon), and what they value in sound.
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