How do you mainly listen to music?

[FuzzyAce]

I'm usually naked.

...did I misunderstand the question?

Usually? I'm always naked.

 

[Moondog Wily]

I work at home, so I have no commute, but when I am in the car, always music on! Usually through my phone which has ~17,000 songs on it that I captured from my CD's in 2005. I go out to see musicians play 2-4 times/week and that is usually 2-3 hours of music through their chosen or house systems. Then there is the cutting of the lawn! It is about a 3 hour process (2.5 acres and lots of obstructions to work around). In that scenario, I am using some cheap wireless headphones and playing stuff from my phone again (phone does have AptX and my stuff is usually in FLAC).

I totally get it though. I spend as much time refining my official releases for the various audio systems as I do writing the songs, many times even more time! I test/optimize on/for two car stereos (2012 Nissan Xterra with a factory Rockford Fosgate system including a shitty subwoofer, 2022 Kia Seltos), 3 laptops (two dell, one hp - all low end), 2 phones (two Motorola low end models), 2 JBL wireless speakers (Charge 2+ pair - nice bass on those for portable wireless units), home theater system (Yamaha receiver, pretty low end, Klipsch 7 speaker surround with subwoofer), studio monitors (Presonus E5's), studio headphones (AKG K712 Pro and Beyer Dynamics DT990 Pro 250 Mhz) and earbuds (some wireless JBL's, some nice Klipsch from 10 years ago and my Westone Pro X50 IEM's). The Nissan always gives me the most trouble and I sometimes just ignore it because I can put on Bob Dylan on that system and it still has too much bass (but the controls for the system don't let me really clean it up proper IMO so "just turn down the bass" on that system does not usually suffice)! Aside from the studio monitors and headphones, best results are usuall through those JBL Charge 2+ speakers ;~))

 

[marsonic]

Fact: What we listen to music on is the worst it has been in the past 50 years.
Collectively speaking, we seem to have descended from the lowly Panasonic
Boomboxes and the Radio Shack Car Stereo. Sorry, Realistic.

The sad part about that is that it's cheaper and easier than ever to buy a nice-sounding system and play music from whatever source you want.

 

[Iron1]

The Nissan always gives me the most trouble and I sometimes just ignore it because I can put on Bob Dylan on that system and it still has too much bass (but the controls for the system don't let me really clean it up proper IMO so "just turn down the bass" on that system does not usually suffice)! Aside from the studio monitors and headphones, best results are usuall through those JBL Charge 2+ speakers ;~))

My car stereo has this bizarre need to increase the boomey frequencies, which is really annoying. And, when I try to mix it out, then the tracks lack low end on other systems... If taking the door panel off to replace the speakers wasn't such a PITA, I'd swap em out. But, it does give me a sense of what other people's crappy car stereos sound like.

And by boomey, I don't mean the 100-200k huge low end, but more the 2-400 range with some odd spike in there of that one range I tend to remove from guitar and bass tones.

 

[marsonic]

My car stereo has this bizarre need to increase the boomey frequencies, which is really annoying. And, when I try to mix it out, then the tracks lack low end on other systems... If taking the door panel off to replace the speakers wasn't such a PITA, I'd swap em out. But, it does give me a sense of what other people's crappy car stereos sound like.

And by boomey, I don't mean the 100-200k huge low end, but more the 2-400 range with some odd spike in there of that one range I tend to remove from guitar and bass tones.

This is actually why I don't really like the "car test" and never have.

If you have one system that you trust and are familiar with, then getting music to sound right on it should be pretty darn close on almost everything, within the limits of what each system can do.

There's only really one "ideal" playback system - but there are an infinite number of ways that playback can be wrong. It flat-out isn't possible to account for all of them.

Based on assumed popularity, an AirPods test may be valuable. But, at least when I've done the comparison...my main setup is more than good enough without bothering.

 

[Achilles]

Remember when.....

 

[James Freeman]

Monitors after work.