Short guide for analytic listening

Analytic listening’s purpose is to understand if an audio track will sound good on most of the audio devices.

The purpose of analytic listening is to understand when an audio track will sound good in most of the audio systems.

To do this, you’ll need a reference (also referred as “neutral”) audio system – or at least something that will come close to it.

Otherwise, you’ll have a unreliable listening situation, and you’ll never know if this track could sound good even on other devices.

If you can’t follow these best practices, you will not able to reliably judge the sonic quality of an audio track and you should rely 100% on your sound engineer’s words.

Listening devices

Best practices

  • Reference audio monitors

    The best system ever.
    Unfortunately, they can be expensive and hard to set up.

  • Home theatre

    Although most of the home theaters are not usually designed to give a reliable acoustic response, they can be used as emergency resource to get a somehow effective idea of how an audio track really sounds like.

    This is not a reliable source, and should not be used for definitive assessments.

  • Big Hi Fi speakers

    With “big” we really mean it: at least 6″ speakers.
    Under that size, you can be sure of being about to listen an extremely distorted acoustic reality.

    This is not a reliable source, and should not be used for definitive assessments.

Avoid

  • Car audio

    This is one of the most diffused bad practices amongst audiophiles and sound engineers.
    Car audio systems are almost the exact opposite of a reliable audio system, for a long list of acoustic reasons. We may write a separate article for this one, because there’s really a lot to say about how wrong it is.

  • Earbuds

    For the love of all the good things on Earth DON’T LISTEN TO MUSIC ON EARBUDS.

  • Laptop speakers

    Laptop speakers are meant to be an emergency resource for mobile listening, and they’re extremely unreliable. There’s really not enough space to house a decent sized speaker.

  • Portable speakers

    They surely look cool, but they’re not meant to be a reliable acoustic source.
    Some device example:
    this
    this
    and also this.

Listening environment

Best practices

  • Silence

    The more the better.

  • Normal volume

    You should be able to normally talk with someone in your room.

Avoid

  • Noise

    The less the better.

  • Continuous listening to the same track

    Your brain will get confused. It’s a scientifical phenomenon: it’s called listening fatigue. You get used to particulars, and you stop noticing them.
    The first 3 listening tests are usually the best ones.

  • High volume

    It heavily alters your ear’s frequency response capability.

  • Multiple audio system references

    They lead to confusion.
    You should use only one system: the best you have.
    You don’t need to ask many times, if you ask to the best right from the start.

Guide: which is the best VST synthesizer?A VST synthesizerAudio Technica ATH-M50 headphonesBest headphones guide