How good is your hearing ? And how do you know ?

As I age, its the loses that really hurt.  The loss of friends, of family, of bike riding 50 miles, of the ability to retain thought or using the word that I knew so well but can't recollect ... the loss of secure balance the loss of a successful day at work...  but the loss of acute hearing is a particularly hard loss.   I still know music, but the magic of the separation of instruments, depth perception, the cleanliness of a triangle is just not there.  Live today, for tomorrow is a different place.

Stringreen, great post, man.

How many of you speak more than one language fluently ? Try to translate and you will see that it will never be good enough, even relatively close languages. Not dialects, that's different. And that is analog into analog translation. Try to translate poetry and you will see even more clearly. I read many books in two languages, translations varied from pretty good to ridiculous, never good enough.
Musicians often don't have great set-up because for them it is all far from real. They can listen to boombox just for outlines and ideas. Besides, they are already musicians.

inna, you still seem to be stretching to come up with  justifications for the fact you personally (apparently) just don’t like digital sources.

You are just ignoring what I pointed out before; that analog involves gross changes of the form of carrier for a signal, and your logic works against analog as much as digital. When acoustic energy is transduced into electricity it is then NOTHING LIKE the organic thing that sat in front of the microphone. How much like an actual entire symphony orchestra is a teeny, tiny stream of electricity? And yet a teeny stream of electricity is used to represent an entire orchestra until it reaches the speakers to be translated back to acoustic energy. And..again...sit in front of a live orchestra....look down at the grooves of a record. If you can not admit the astounding alteration that the sound of a symphony has undergone to be changed in to plastic grooves, you just can’t be taken seriously. In trying to portray the digital carrier system as somehow turning real sounds in to some unnatural "other" form, you simply are ignoring the same happens in analog.

Further, your reasoning ought to apply to visual signals as well, such as video cameras and televisions. If your reasoning were correct "you ought to keep the visual information all analog." But the digital TVs and sources of today are now vastly more realistic than any analog TV signals we had before.

We get it. You don’t care for digital. But your rationalisations in trying to go beyond your mere opinion, to prescribing how things ought to be as if you’d found some objective truth to declare, just don’t hold water.

@bdp24

I'm curious: when you talk about your high frequency hearing loss, did you mean it was already gone 30 years ago, or that now your hearing tops out at 15k?   If it tops out at 15k now, and if you are middle aged, that's quite good.

I'm almost 55 and mine tops out just under 15k.  Which frankly surprises me, especially given having played in very loud bands earlier in life and working in production sound for 30 years. 

There's various on-line "how old is your hearing" tests and I come up with a "hearing age" of between 38 and 40 years old, so not doing too badly at almost 55.   But I believe I'm now at the crest in age where hearing starts taking a bigger dive in the high frequencies...so I better get as much listening in while I can enjoy those sparkling highs, while I can!

But, I've been protecting my hearing for a long time.   I started noticing Tinnitus in the early 90's and that put the fear-of-gawd in me, so I started protecting my hearing from then on.  Many of the guys I played with in bands who didn't protect their hearing are now having some pretty serious hearing issues!  Like waking up one morning and all their high frequency is gone!