Philips Golden Ears

[Lowe]

So you think you know your audio eh?

Try this and see how you get on. For what it's worth my ears are golden, but to be honest the mp3 test was a tricky blighted!

https://www.goldenears.philips.com/en/index.html

[scaryjim]

Hard to tell from the website, is this doable with headphones? If so it strikes me as an excellent opportunity to both try out the Sennheisers I picked up at Christmas as recording cans, and test my own hearing.

As for you having golden ears, that's hardly a surprise now, is it...?

[Lowe]

Yeah it'll work with cans. Probably the best bet really - less chance of a room masking subtle details

[scaryjim]

Cool, I'll give it a go tonight or over the weekend and report back

[g8ina]

Fascinating, my Senn 202s were nowhere near good enough over my HD580s !

I have to do the whole thing again tomorrow as I ran out of time but I was doing reasonably well

[Lowe]

If you register it saves your progress

[watercooled]

Currently up to gold but It's longer than I expected so I'll have to carry on tomorrow.

I think I found reverb the most challenging so far. I found it made more sense when picturing it as wet or dry sound, as it says in the side panel, but some of the differences were really subtle.

The add/subtract noise threw me a bit too, I wasn't sure whether a sample was mid or low subtract IIRC.

I found the mp3 also required a fair amount of concentration but to my own surprise I could tell the difference first time on all of them.

I'll see how I get on with the rest of the gold section tomorrow...

[Funkstar]

From what others have said, I take it having Golden Ears has a lot to do with how well you listen to things as opposed to purely being able to hear things. Also seems to have a lot to do with understanding what you are hearing and identifying different acoustic element etc.

I'll have to have a go at this when I'm at home.

[Lowe]

Yeah it's all of the above really - being able to distinguish and elaborate on what's wrong and why.