In a swish recording studio deep within the bowels of the Abbey Road complex in north west London, the play button is solemnly depressed on a shiny, tiny, all-in-one £70 stereo system. This, I’ve been informed, is to demonstrate the miserable level of audio quality that we’re used to hearing these days. But as Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” blares aggressively out of the half-pint speakers, none of its evocative power seems to be missing. Quincy Jones’s sublime production conjures up memories of coach trips, teenage discos, holidays, Cornettos – but I’m snapped out of my reverie by Andy Napthine from loudspeaker manufacturers Bowers & Wilkins, who presses the stop button, perhaps slightly concerned that I’m enjoying it too much. “Now,” he says, “this is what it’s meant to sound like.” The same tune is now pushed through a huge £13,000 pair of their own 800D speakers, all hi-tech carbon fibre and diamond transducers, and it does indeed sound incredible – crystal clear vocals, powerful bass and, if you listen closely enough, you can probably hear Quincy Jones discreetly breaking wind in the control room. But my emotional response feels identical. Coach trips. Cornettos. Does that mean that I just don’t care about sound?

Many people within the music industry – musicians, studio engineers, composers, equipment manufacturers – are claiming that we’re losing our ability to appreciate sound properly. All kinds of factors are responsible, they say: cheap listening devices that try to mask their inferior quality with loudness buttons, bass boost switches and the dreaded graphic equalizer; listening on the move in a state of mild distraction via mobile phones, or the ubiquitous iPod; and, lastly, compressed audio file formats such as WMA, AAC and MP3 that allow such huge amounts of music to fit onto portable devices. A 128kbps MP3 file (which, according to Apple’s iTunes software, is regarded as “Good” Quality) is less than 1/11th of the size of the uncompressed original so, in theory, has 10/11ths of the audio information missing. High quality audio formats such as Super Audio CDs have been proudly launched; we’ve largely ignored them. And while we seem keen on snapping up HDTV sets in the pursuit of perfect video, we couldn’t really give a hoot about how our albums sound. And audiophiles just can’t understand it.

Tim Lawrence, a lecturer in Music Culture at the University of East London, even contends that, faced with our increasingly uncritical listening techniques, producers and engineers are creating music that’s overwhelmingly loud and has very little variation in dynamic range; it’s almost as if the degradation of sound has become fashionable, for musicians and listeners alike. He might be right. When I’m out and about, I listen to MP3 files on a Nokia mobile phone with an old pair of minidisc headphones attached. And at home, my CDs languish at the back of the shed, and instead I’m playing yet more MP3 files from an old laptop with its lid shut. Perhaps I’m not showing enough respect to Beefheart, Beach Boys, Bogshed or the rest of the motley crew I listen to day in, day out. Maybe I need to rediscover the art of listening.

There’s probably no better place to do that than Abbey Road Studios, where a whistlestop tour of the building reveals the podium where Sir Edward Elgar stood to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra, the piano on which Paul McCartney bashed out “Lady Madonna” and the toilets where The Independent’s very own Alex James took a louche drag on a cigarette between sessions. Sat in Studio 3, Dr John Dibb from Bowers & Wilkins presents what he describes as a “sound-tasting” session. Just as wine connoisseurs can educate our palates and point out contrasting flavours in various vintages, Dibb believes that we can be taught how to listen properly. And the first thing to consider is our environment. “You need to think about your positioning in relation to the speakers,” he says. “Sit in a comfortable seat, without any distractions – but, most importantly, close your eyes. Your brain becomes much more attuned to what you’re hearing if you just focus on the one sense.”

Reclining in an expensive chair, in a quiet air-conditioned studio, with my eyes closed and a sustaining bowl of fresh fruit within arms reach, I feel ready for my musical rebirthing. And, over the next hour or so, Dibb plays me a range of music while pointing out the details that I should be looking out for. The transparency and clarity of an orchestral piece; the finger-plucking detail of a folk guitarist; the laid-back yet unwaveringly precise rhythms of 1970s Jamaican reggae; the ambience of an operatic aria; and the ferocious attack of nu-metal. “You should be able to pick out all these elements in good recordings,” says Dibb, “and when you can, it becomes more interesting, more entertaining. Now, if you go back to your own music collection, you’ll be able to hear it in many new and different ways.”

I pop outside for a breather, taking my iPod with me. Listening to a few tracks at random, they just don’t sound that bad to me. The high frequencies – the ones that are supposed to suffer most at the hands of MP3 compression – might not be reproduced faithfully, but I don’t know if I can tell, and – perhaps worse – I’m still not sure if I care. I sheepishly admit this to Dibb on my return. “It’s not that they sound bad,” he says, “it’s just that you might not be hearing all the things that were originally put into it.” Abbey Road’s Andrew Dudman concurs. “MP3 does degrade the sound,” he says, “but to be honest, probably not enough for most people to notice, even on the high resolution systems we have here.” So if MP3 isn’t the enemy, what is? Dibb is emphatic that it’s a lifestyle thing. “Today, it’s all about convenience, rather that quality. It’s about having 1,000 albums in your pocket. People have forgotten the benefits of making listening into an event.”

So if I’m going to markedly improve my listening experience, how much do I need to spend? And, in a market crammed with confusing options, where do I start? “Well, if I had £250 spare,” says Dudman, “I’d go for a bottom-of-the-range model by a high-end speaker company rather than the other way round – purely because the quality always filters down through the range. And if you’re talking headphones, I swear by Sennheiser’s HD600, both at home and in the studio.” Later in the day, I pop into a branch of Richer Sounds and get the opinions of Mike, a ponytailed Iron Maiden fan with a passion for audio. “The key is to match up all the parts of your system,” he says. “If you buy a £600 amplifer, there’s no point in hooking up £20 speakers to it, you’re just wasting your money.” And would I feel the benefits if I remortgaged my flat and splashed out big time? “To be honest,” he says, “anyone who forks out £6,000 for a CD player is doing it purely for status. Especially if they’re over 21, as they’ll have already lost 20% of their hearing. They’re just not going to appreciate it.”

I’m still not convinced of the merits of upgrading, and Dr Eric Clarke, an expert on psychoacoustics at Oxford University, has some sympathy. “Audiophiles have just developed incredibly acute – some might say irrelevant – but certainly very impressive auditory skills. They can hear all kinds of details that the rest of us can’t, and it’s almost as if they have taught themselves to become irritated by poor audio quality.” So I shouldn’t feel guilty about enjoying mp3s through minuscule speakers? “Of course not. Research has shown that a fairly poor auditory signal can trigger the same emotional response. And the more familiar you are with the music, the lower quality you actually need for your brain to be able to recapture a sense of the original.”

Clarke has effectively warned me against listening to music on high-quality loudspeakers or headphones, because I’ll inevitably end up wanting to spend money on them. But it might be too late; after my Abbey Road experience I find myself repositioning speakers in my living room at ear height, casually browsing online hi-fi catalogues, and pondering – against my better judgement – whether cables with gold-plated connectors would improve the sound. The seeds of doubt have been sown. So, what’s the lesson here? If you have no spare cash, learn to love your cheap stereo and your mp3s for what they are – a lo-fi approximation of what your musical heroes intended you to hear. But if you want more from your music, treat it with a bit of dignity. Pamper it with quality loudspeakers, sit back, close your eyes, and listen. Surely you can tell the difference. Can’t you?