A recent study of the product of traditional phonetics ear-training revealed a number of interesting (sometimes unexpected) effects. Mastery of the sounds of the IPA (including Cardinal Vowels) was taken as the goal/benchmark. 125 ab initio students of phonetics at a UK university were followed through a typical year-long phonetics ear-training programme; their ability to recognise sounds was tested at two points during the year. With respect to vowel identification, the findings confirmed the expectation that contextualised vowels would be harder to identify than vowels in isolation, but they also raised questions about the contribution made by length of training to the level of achievement.