How to Go About Improving Your Critical Listening Skills
I should know. I was a one-man band working 60 to 80 hours a week with very little help until about 2000. I had someone cleaning records and packing and shipping, but everything else was on me. It was a lot.
In order to evaluate the qualities of the titles I was selling back then, whether on Heavy Vinyl or thin, imported or domestic, original or reissue, the process was the same.
I would play the record, and I would listen for the qualities that were important to me, qualities you might say were of a “make it or break it” nature.
What I mostly wanted to know about the record was whether it was:
- Tonally correct.
- Big enough.
- Clear enough.
- Balanced from top to bottom.
- Energetic.
- Present in the midrange.
- Not bass shy.
- Not rolled off in the high frequencies.
- Not compressed.
- And, finally, whether it would appeal to a wide enough audience to make carrying it worthwhile.
If I had other pressings of the same title to audition, which, to be honest, sometimes I did not, I would play those to see how they compared.
For some records this was not easy. To give just one example, for many of the Speakers Corners Decca classical pressings, I rarely had especially good pressings to judge them by.