Listening Fatigue

In addition to what Tireguy wrote, I also feel that speakers contribute to listening fatigue: If the power output from the drivers is not matched correctly (due to incorrect choice of drivers &/or ill-designed xover) then one or more area of the freq. spectrum will be emphasized. In my experience an accentuated tweeter causes listening fatigue real quickly + for me, excess bass also causes listening fatigue.
Now, several listeners like tizzy tweeters & ample bass! I was @ a Radioshack store buying a battery for my wrist watch & a HT system was demo-playing. The shelves in that section of the store were rattling & the bass boom was driving me nuts but the salesman told me "more, the better!". I can only extrapolate what his 2-ch might sound like if he had one!

It is both recording and system related. Really good systems have you turning up the volume with reduced fatigue, so it's not directly related to volume. Sean
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Assuming that the components are of a certain caliber (that statement really needs to be qualified), I'm of the opinion that listener fatigue is primarily the result of poorly designed or no AC line conditioning, poorly designed or no vibration controlling apparatus', no dedicated AC circuits/lines, and poor choices in ics and speaker cables.

One can own the very best components, but without properly addressing each of these other items, one is likely to be doomed for mediocrity and much listener fatigue.

-IMO

Harshness! It can come from any number of souces. It can be a bad recording, noisy power, poor set-up, any of the various pieces of equipment, cables, etc, or any combination thereof. The lower the total level of harshness, the louder I can play the music and the longer I can listen to it without fatigue. :o)

Of course just as every athlete has their limits of endurance in a given situation, every audiophile has their specific pressure points when it comes to fatigue.

A lot has already been mentioned but in general I would say anything that deviates from your standard listening parameters would cause fatigue. I like to think of this as a bell shaped graph, with the mids being at the apex & so less likely to fall outside a narrower band of acceptability, with bass being more forgiving & the high freqs being out of normal hearing range. Note that this is just an approximation I thought of after I started typing, as everybody doesn't respond to the same stimulus, although I'm making the assumption the mid band would cause more problems for more folks than the other ends of the sonic spectrum. Additionally, I would have to think there are those that cannot tolerate much outside of their system, as they just have gotten so used to their *sound* nothing else can match up. This is not a subtle snub, rather an observation of how we become creatures of habit & in this case in regards to a certain level of sonic reproduction.

I don't care for brightness or harshness & tend to reduce the mid/upper-freqs at the 1-2kHz levels by cutting the signal level -4 to -6 dB but that's just how I prefer to listen. On gear that isn't adjustable I buy/sell until I find what I like best.

With all that, I'd have to say volume only exacerbates the issue of fatigue but doesn't cause it in & by itself and I'd also have to say the electronics contribute more to fatigue, one example being when I heard the same horn spkrs. with different tube electronics, with one application very close to unlistenable for more than 10 minutes. Then again everything but the spkr. was different, so who's to say it was just the amp & not the CDP or TT? It all still qualifies as electronics to me.

Also there's no doubt the room plays a big part but you can mostly bypass that with nearfield listening, which would at least let you know if it was the gear or not causing the problem, if any.