An analogous situation to hearing and listening is eating and tasting food. I thoroughly enjoy eating, but I perceive a dish as one, big, wonderful flavor, whereas my wife tastes the same dish as a collection of individual flavors. What this means is that I enjoy the dish and that's it, but my wife can go home and duplicate it. She has learned how to breakdown the whole into basic elements and knows how the details work together to form one magnificent piece of art. In many ways, great chefs are like top engineers.
Chefs use their ability to taste while engineers use their ability to listen.
Engineers as a whole have developed their ability to listen so as to focus not only on the main subject, but also on the nuances of what is surrounding the subject, and even beyond. Just as the chef must decide whether to saut in butter or olive oil to get the right flavor, the engineer must decide things such as how wide the stereo spread on background vocals should be to give them impact without causing distraction. But for the top engineer, other issues such as spatial imaging or dimensionality and low-level detail are also as important, just as the master chef is as concerned with presentation as with taste. This author once read a review where the reviewers agreed on the sound quality of a power amp, but one felt that it placed you in the fourth row of the audience, while the other thought it put you in the eighth. There are two issues that need to be addressed.