How I Listen and Evaluate Albums

Everything I publish comes back to two questions.

For the Index:
Which digital edition is worth listening to, and why?

For reviews:
How does this album come across as a listening experience?

The approach is the same. The scope is different.

I separate character from quality. A recording can be bright, dark, wide, soft, or highly detailed. None of that is inherently better or worse. What matters is whether it holds together and serves the music.

I level-match when comparing editions. Louder almost always feels better. That advantage needs to be removed before any comparison means anything.

I use measurements to support listening. Meters help me understand and explain what I’m hearing. They don’t make decisions for me.

Not everything I measure is shown publicly. Some details stay in the background so the writing can stay focused on the listening experience.

I use a fixed reference setup so that judgments are consistent.

Speaker listening happens in a dedicated, acoustically treated room. This is where I assess space, depth, centre image, and how the music sits in front of me. It’s also where bass behaviour and the relationship between direct sound and room or hall ambience become clear.

Headphones are used as a secondary reference.

They make it easier to focus on detail, transient behaviour, imaging precision, and low-level artifacts that are harder to isolate over speakers. I use them to confirm calls, not to replace speaker listening.

The setup stays the same across everything I publish.

I focus on what actually shapes the experience of a recording:

• tonal balance
• clarity and low-level detail
• transient behaviour
• dynamics and loudness behaviour
• stereo imaging and spatial coherence
• sense of space, distance, and decay
• mix differences, where relevant

For each of these, I make two calls:

• what the sound is like
• whether it works

That second part matters more.

When I work on the Index, I compare editions directly.

That means controlled listening, level-matching, and moving back and forth until the differences are clear. The goal is a simple outcome: which version is worth starting with.

Reviews are different.

They usually focus on a single release and look at how it holds together as a listening experience. Measurements may inform the writing, but the priority is always clarity, not exhaustiveness.

There are two easy ways to get sound wrong.

One is to treat it as purely subjective, where anything goes.

The other is to reduce it to numbers and rankings.

I don’t do either.

Everything on TrueResAudio is based on listening, supported by analysis where it helps, and judged in the context of the music itself.

That’s the standard behind every recommendation.