What is "critical listening"?

Critical listening occurs when you listen to the reproduction. Musical enjoyment occurs when you listen to the performance. From rain on the roof or birds chirping, from clock/radio or high $$$ system, to live music, the choice is yours to behold.

Sugarbrie, you make a fascinating point, which my thoughts only brushed briefly, when I wrote my post. In the sense you write, I would agree with you: In music lover mode critical listening in fact does not stop, but with me, it then goes right into the music, not into the system anymore and through the years our ears get trained and we learn to develop a language to express what we aurally percieve. I was close to a person, deeply musically trained, who was close to Menuhin and we went all over Europe when he concerted there and I also learnt to my own amazement I must say, that my "critique" was listened to and went over well. But then, mind you, M. was an extremely cultured and polite gentleman in the true sense of the word.....and yes, good sound and bad performance generally makes me angry with frustration but I will listen to Abado's rendering of the Beethoven symphonies, although the CDs are probably amongst the worst, DGG has ever managed to bring out. Cheers,

Do both: listen "critically" at first, using my thinking mind to identify incongruities in how stereo sounds like sound I hear everyday, then, let go of "critical", analytic faculty and perceive musical meaning from deeper symmetry where desire to think about sound fades. Neither mode of perception is "lesser" than the other and both exist on a continuum of perception, so, in our experience, they are not separate (until we separate them by talkng about them). What "lessens" the ability to perceive is when one adheres to an assumption (thinking) that "critical" listening is the only valid means of deriving meaning from music, or, contra, that only trans-thinking listening is valid for saying what music is, or how good a stereo is. Each sight reveals different aspects of a stereo performance.

I think and listen, then I don't think and listen. There is no problem.

ASA: Ca va sens dire! Great to have you on this thread and your point is well made and taken!

To me, casual listening is plopping down in front of an unfamiliar system, listening to some unfamiliar music. And you're really not listening for anything in particular, maybe you're just taking a breather.

Critical listening would be listening to familiar music on a hopefully somewhat familiar system, listening for how a component handles specific nuances that you find, well..., critical.