How do you listen to music?

[Travis]

I\'m wondering how most of you listen to music. Do you listen in your car, headphones, home stereo system?  Do you have monitors hooked up to your computer and do you listen to most of your music that way. I\'m also interested in what kind, make and power your stereo is/has, if you know. I\'d like to get an idea how much listening is done on headphones and how much on speakers and how into the quality of those systems you are? Feel free to list your stereo gear.

[ella_mental]

Hi Travis!

The way I listen to music has changed.  I used to get a cd and sit there and hold the cd and listen to it.  Now I get cds and put them on my computer and then put them on my Creative Zen Vision M.  I listen with headphones and I also have the speakers.  We also have an old school stereo tower thing with tape players, a turntable, an 8 track player that\'s not hooked up, and a cd player.  The speakers are wired through the house.  I can also hook the mp3 player up to that.  When we rock out, which we do fairly often, we blast that.

* I forgot... I have the tape player thing to hook the Zen up in the car.  Actually, that\'s the place I love the Zen the most.

[Timotheedle]

I have a bose 321 system and play CD\'s with it and plug in my Ipod, and I have a quality set of JVC "bucket" headphones, I guess they\'re called (the large kind), I play CD\'s in the car often, yeah. Lossless format on the Ipood, I assume that generally improves sound quality, if not, whatever.

[polishbucket]

I change sources throughout the day, for example:

Car stereo system in the morning that has a CD player and a small (300-watt) amp/w sub-woofer (12") to add some fullness to the sound.

5.1 Logitech speakers connected to my computer in the afternoon.  I usually use Winamp and queue up a few ripped CDs I\'m into that week.

Beyerdynamic DT-770 headphones for a bit before I fall asleep.  I use one of the older Zune brick 30gb players set on Acoustic mode.

Hope that helps!

[BelieveIntheBucket]

play cd\'s on my sony stereo or plug my ipod or computer into the same

[Duckhead]

I listen to music a few different ways:

Ipod: I have 2. One is called the Bucketpod with 90% BH on it and another with misc artists. I usually listen to them with my Altec Lansing portable speaker system, it has a 8 hr built in rechargeable battery and is easily portable and great for taking to the beach or using in the yard, really good sound for such a small system. I also use skull candy earbuds when working out or listening in private. And sometimes when I sleep I use a ipod pillow-thingy (softsounds) that I got as a gift.

Car: My Jeep has a cassette player in it that I don't use so it's only radio. I do listen to cds in the car, I blew my passenger speaker in my Olds listening to CN2. Just a stock stereo system but it used to sound good.

House: I am still old school, I have this older Mitsubishi receiver (big and heavy) that we have hooked up to a Kenwood amplifier/equalizer and that is hooked to 2 cd players. First is a single cd player by JVC and the other is a Pioneer 6 disc changer (the kind with the cartridges). Speaker wise I have a set of Sony's and a smaller set of Kenwood's. In the art studio I have another old school system with mixed Pioneer and JVC components but I don't use it that much, I usually just use the ipod out there nowadays. All of my home stereo equipment was bought at yard sales for dirt cheap but has great sound, not sure on wattage.

I don't use my computer except to watch youtube vids and manage my itunes.

[stumpdangler]

I\'m wondering how most of you listen to music. Do you listen in your car, headphones, home stereo system?  Do you have monitors hooked up to your computer and do you listen to most of your music that way. I\'m also interested in what kind, make and power your stereo is/has, if you know. I\'d like to get an idea how much listening is done on headphones and how much on speakers and how into the quality of those systems you are? Feel free to list your stereo gear.

Most of the time I listen to music on a cd through a  couple shelf systems by Sony. They are probably 90-100 watts. I have a Roland CM-30 as a computer monitor because I have it on hand. Stock stereo, nothing special, for the car. A Zen mp3 player 4 GB. I always rip at  192 or better. The home stereo doesn\'t get much use these days. One of the better Sony receivers from about 15 years ago with various components. Right now I think the CD player is an insignia or some cheap piece of crap like that. I really need to upgrade that hunk of excrement. Nothing special head phone-wise they don\'t tend to last very long. A real better set of head phones is on my list.

I hope this helps. Thanks for all that you do, Travis!

[hexaChord]

My job includes testing new gear (e.g. CD players, amplifiers, loudspeakers) before it hits the market, so I\'m able to listen to a lot of music while working. Therefore my setup changes every week, from a small 500 watts system to line arrays with over 10,000 watts. Buckethead and Bill Laswell are almost always amongst the used reference signals, be it "Crime Slunk Scene", "Enter the Chicken" or "Electric Tears".


At home I have different setups, too, but mostly use a 360 watts satellite system:
Omnitronic AS-360

I do not use headphones much.

[Chris DiCicco]

Boombox 1 Sony CFD-50 Bathroom
Boombox 2 Sony CDF-440 Living Room

Boomboxlike thing RCA 3 Disc #\'s are gone... but I use this for an Extra Speaker Unit (for movies only CD tray turner and Tape player broken)

Tascam Satilite and subwoofer set up for Zoom Recording Studio MRS-802B

Panasonic Portabel Walkman w Headphones.

hope this helps, Travis.

far as my Headphones for the others the last two were Radioshack, My Dad broke the first pair and I followed closely by braking the replacement.


LOOKING FOR SOME KOSS HEADPHONES, as I write.

[slunkatron]

I listen mostly to my iPod pretty much every time I can (thank you so much for Population Override;  I can\'t even imagine how many times I have listened to that album).  Oh, and I boosted the quality of the tracks when I ripped them to iTunes so they are much better than normal mp3s.  I have Bose earbud headphones for that.  Otherwise I listen on my stereo system.  I have a Yamaha V663 receiver and two large stand alone Paradigm speakers.  I will probably go surround at some point, but really it sounds pretty great to me now.  I can\'t even get close to the max volume without scaring myself.  Oh, I have a port to connect my iPod to the receiver.  It is actually pretty sweet and I can control it with a remote and see the iPod screen on my TV.  So I have all of my music instantly available and don\'t have to get up to change it.  Wow, I am pathetically spoiled.

Oh, and in the car I hook up my iPod through the car tape deck.

[DrJustice]

I used to be a bit of a hi-fi freak, but gave that up years ago. I\'ll always have a really good sounding stereo system in my living room, though (current boxes: Tandberg CD player, Adcom and Accuphase amps, Seas and Kef speakers, etc). Sound quality is very important to me, so no mp3\'s if I can help it. My entertainment PC is hooked up to a mixer with a good DAC. The mixer goes straight to the stereo. Thus I can enjoy all kinds of music from all kinds of sources, including playing guitars and keys, in my living room with good sound.

I play CD\'s in my car, which has a Bose sound system.

Headphones are only used in studio and research situations.

I don\'t use any kind of portable player (If I did, it would have to support WAV/FLAC and I\'d have to wear big dorky Beyerdynamic headphones )

The bottom line is using high quality sound, and always taking very good care of those fragile organs called ears!
 
DJ
--

[Diatonic_mealworm]

That\'s really none of your business... J/k   most of my friends and I use our ipods and have car stereos that have ipod inputs so you can listen to 100\'s of songs on long road trips..cds are mostly stored at home nowdays after they are ingested into my computer of course, plus this really saves on normal cd wear and tear and is the optimal way to go imo. The only time i use my headphones ( Sony cheap ones) are when I\'m working out.

Ps tell Buckethead to come to Minnesota!

Thanks

[HansF]

CD Player, Pre Amplifier and Power Amplifier from Burmester. Loudspeakers TC70X from the swiss manufacturer Piega.

[waisinet]

I mostly listen to music on my home cinema-system (onkyo tx-sr 805, Teufel Theater 8, Denon DVD-2800 DVD-Player)

[Travis]

Thanks, this is helpful. I\'ve been mixing records for 35 years. There is no right way to mix a record. How I frame a sound in a mix is as important to me as what instrument I use. How those blend is a choice as important as any other aspect of record making.

A lot of the final sound has to do with what medium your mixing on and for and in my case anyway, as I said, personal preference. I don\'t have to worry about some suit telling me it needs to sound this way or that or like, (insert this top 10 record here). I\'ve been in a few of those meetings ands its truly chillingly brain dead.

I have in the last couple of years been checking mixes carefully on headphones.
Headphone are a whole other world than speakers and you can get sucked in mixing for maximum effect for headphones but at the expense of how they sound on speakers. For instance I love the way the fender Rhodes tremolo bounces from speaker to speaker in a room, so much so I shrugged off the jarring effect of listening to it on headphones. Headphone listening has become so much more prevalent I don\'t do that anymore. Auto systems are kind of an in between listening environment, because of the power and acoustic isolation a car system resembles headphones more that a room for speakers.

A record will sound completely different on any given system. So, I\'m interested in how often and on what you listen to. The percentage of listening done on headphones and on speakers. So this is good stuff. I see we have a few audiophiles here.  I\'m also interested in the range of quality in your listening systems.