SINGAPORE — Anyone can be an audio connoisseur and aural discernment can be trained, according to President and Managing Director of Sennheiser Electronic Asia Ng Chee Soon.

Speaking with TODAY, Mr Ng said that, while sensitivity to audio frequencies can degrade over time and he cannot scientifically say you can train to recover your hearing, discernment of sound can be trained.

And, like playing a musical instrument, all it takes is practice. “Say you go to a concert and you play the same piece of music at home and you listen to it with your headphones. Whether you can hear the strains of the double bass or the violins playing, that ability to look out for what constitutes good reproduction can be trained,” he said.

“At the most basic level, for a lot of people, loud is good. And it’s true. They could say ‘this is very loud’ or ‘the bass is very strong, it is good’ and that’s okay. We all experience music in different ways.

“But over time, especially if you are endowed with a good pair of headphones that can reproduce all the details, you could start noticing the flute accompaniment layered behind the singer’s voice. And you start looking out for these things ... Are the details there? And when you close your eyes, you can hear the piano coming from here and the double bass coming from over there — which is called ‘staging’. You place the stage in your mind. In a bad reproduction, you just hear sound and can’t place it.”

The human ear is capable of only hearing audio frequencies between 20Hz and 20KHz. And each of us may be sensitive to different frequencies — even the shape of our ear canals can influence how we interpret sounds, explained Mr Ng. So there is no “perfect” pair of headphones for everyone. This is why Sennheiser advocates listening on its products before deciding on what to get. The German audio company, which produces at both ends of the music recording and reproduction cycle with microphones and headphones respectively, prides itself on its concept stores.

In Singapore, there are two concept stores — one in Marina Square and the other at the Alexandra Technopark. Sennheiser Asia also has sales representation, as well as concept stores, in Manila, Bangkok, Vietnam, Cambodia and the latest in South Korea.

“In South Korea, we have a new concept called the Sennheiser Music Cafe. We marry the coffee-drinking culture with the music culture, because they are big in the country . In environments like these, we tell people to try (the audio equipment) because nothing beats what our ears tell us, whether the headphones are good or not,” said Mr Ng.

“The best way to pick headphones is just to listen. It may sound funny — such a technical thing, engineering — but what it boils down to is you’ve got to go listen. That’s why Sennheiser is a brand that prides ourselves, in trying to pursue the elusive perfect sound, on creating environments where potential customers can come and listen and not just look at the packaging and read the specs.”