The Philips Golden Ears Challenge
October 25, 2015 8:51 AM   Subscribe

"We know that we are not alone in this obsession with sound, which is why we are inviting you to take our Golden Ears challenge..."

"This online challenge contains the essential elements of our professional Golden Ears training program. There are four difficulty levels: Basic, Bronze, Silver and ultimately, Golden Ears. Each level is divided into short challenges that are designed to develop and test your listening skills."
posted by ZenMasterThis (19 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wait, now my ears have to be gold, as well as my audio cables? Sigh...
posted by Windopaene at 8:53 AM on October 25, 2015 [14 favorites]


Is this something I would need an fm radio to understand?
posted by oceanjesse at 9:06 AM on October 25, 2015


This is an interesting subject that's worth an actual discussion, rather than jokes.

"Golden ears" isn't an expression made up by Philips - it's a professional term in common usage for at least three decades, and it means an engineer or musician with a particularly good ability to distinguish tiny differences in music. I was very honored to labeled as such by Bob Katz when he was mastering our CD in the earlier 90s - who I think was suspicious about our strong agreement on tiny tweaks and tried to fool us by adjusting a control that did nothing, something we didn't realize till a year later.

Not all golden-eared people are good engineers, and there are tons of really good audio engineers who definitely don't have golden ears (and in fact have various hearing impairments due to years of high volume audio signals). I myself suspect that I have probably lost a good chunk of it in the last twenty years, not that I'm better than "competent". Some golden-eared engineers spend far too much time on minutia and ignore the main issue for pop music albums anyway - it has to sound good.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:42 AM on October 25, 2015 [11 favorites]


lupus_yonderboy - have you tried this challenge, and if so how faithful/accurate a test do you think it is? The test answers have been obvious to me so far (partway through Bronze level), and I wonder whether it's really useful or just set up to make us hoi-polloi feel better.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:09 AM on October 25, 2015


(I'm thinking of some of those online hearing tests like the one that tells me I have the ears of someone 20 years my junior, which I have a hard time believing)
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:15 AM on October 25, 2015


I just took it through Bronze ears and so far it's all been pretty clear what the correct answer was though I can imagine if you're not listening on good speakers / headphones some of the EQ related ones might be difficult. The one section I had a hard time with was "coloration" in basic training - I genuinely couldn't tell the difference in the final 2 questions / slightest gradations of coloration (it went from being dead simple for every other question to me not being able to tell the difference at all). Could be my ears, could be that my headphones just don't have that great of a response in those frequencies. Without a standardized and calibrated system to test on, it's hard to know.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 10:45 AM on October 25, 2015


Also I never want to hear any of these songs again.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 10:48 AM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Are you suggesting that she no longer makes you go WOW?
posted by vanar sena at 10:50 AM on October 25, 2015 [2 favorites]


So yeah, I was just having a super difficult time with MP3 Artefacting on my Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro studio monitors (80 ohm, through my macbook retina headphone jack). Switched to my Rha MA750i in-ears and it was much much more obvious.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 11:08 AM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


(if you get all involved in it and only then decide to sign up to save your spot...why oh why must it take you all the way back to the beginning? if i have to do coloration again i'm going to go crazy, it's the hardest one!)
posted by mittens at 11:09 AM on October 25, 2015


...tried to fool us by adjusting a control that did nothing

Also a really good way to find those with big egos on stage - nothing like a thumbs up from a lead singer you don't like when you haven't actually changed anything.
posted by deadwax at 11:13 AM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


I quit when I got to the notching question in Golden Ears. I do not have the exact frequency identification of a 63 vs 125 vs 250 vs 500 vs 1k vs 2k vs 4k vs 8k vs 16k notch memorized.
posted by SmileyChewtrain at 11:33 AM on October 25, 2015


I prefer Bismuth Ears. Better dynamics.
posted by clvrmnky at 3:24 PM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


It crapped out on me part-way through bronze, but know that I know that you should sign up unless you want to start over, I guess I will.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:58 PM on October 25, 2015


SmileyChewtrain: “So yeah, I was just having a super difficult time with MP3 Artefacting ”
Yeah, the clouds don't make me sore, but apparently the remedy is I need new headphones.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:59 PM on October 25, 2015


I'm going to get stuck as soon as they ask a question that involves frequencies above 10kHz (too much rock and/or roll as a young-un)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:56 PM on October 25, 2015


I'll never know if I have better than Bronze Ears because the website broke halfway through the "Details" test, but I can at least say I've got Gold Programming compared to whoever built this.
posted by scrump at 3:51 AM on October 26, 2015


I got to Bronze very easily, but it certainly does seem that they are implicitly testing the bloody minded ability to listen to the same loop pretty effectively. Which, to be fair, is a very valuable trait when producing/mixing.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:57 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm going to wait until everyone else has finished playing with it because it's crashing after every little thing.
posted by snottydick at 11:10 AM on October 27, 2015


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