Active Listening
Once you’ve sold the compelling benefits of “actively listening”, the pursuit of higher end audio gear to improve the listening experience may not be that far behind.
The paradox of our being awash in technology with ever greater access to the world’s catalog of music (Pandora, Spotify, digital music, downloading etc. ) is that most of us aren’t actively listening to it.
Sure, technically we hear it, but we don’t listen to it – at least not actively. For most, music has become background “noise”, something that’s there while you’re doing something else.
What is active listening? It’s when you deliberately sit down and listen to music as a primary activity and don’t do anything else while you’re doing it.
We’re all doing less of that than we used to while at the same time running around multi-tasking like a bunch of ADD lunatics.
Of course the high-end audio equipment industry would love for all of us to become active listeners because active listening is central to becoming an audiophile who obsesses over the listening experience and the hardware that delivers it bigger and better.
So how do you sell “active listening” to the increasingly stressed out, distracted and not all that happy about it society?