Well maybe it IS my hearing

Great posts and a very appropriate thread.  Thanks erik, I hope more of us will post their views. 66 and still rocking rarely loud anymore, somewhere around 85 dB but it depends on the music. Hearing loss due to jet engines, parties, concerts and racing. For myself I think I can discern a change in cabling if it is quite dramatic but otherwise no I cannot hear a difference. I have achieved a system that makes me smile and sounds superior to me but that of course is subjective. Ears are like fingerprints, none are the same.
Music rocks my world

@erik_squires :  "Do I really want to be the person who can taste a difference in $300 bottles of wine, or one who enjoys $30 every week?

We do that to ourselves a little too much."

Well that's just it isn't it? But that's exactly what this whole audiophile business is about for quite a few people here, if not most of us. And you would have to include yourself in that group too right?

And to be honest, if someone were to offer me the ability to hear the differences in power cables, between what type of wood my pre-amp was sitting on or the effect that the position of throw pillows in my listening room has on SQ...............I would decline. Such levels of perception (real or imagined) seem primarily to drive discontentment. And discontentment drives the audio industry.....and the rest of our economy as well.

@ Eric 
I always enjoy reading your post on what DIY u are doing.  Hobbies are supposed to be fun, so continue doing what you enjoy.  People always have opinions good and bad,  do like I do and weed out the garbage.  Many people here are help and share there experiences.  As for the others, just ignore.  Looking forward to you next DIY.  By the way thanks for your suggestion on treating my room first, you were correct.  

High frequency capacity can diminish with age, and does.

What does not go away and allows 70 year olds to evaluate tweeters..is... temporal acuity.

Our hearing is based not on frequency range but on complex temporal harmonic transient (macro and micro) timing position, level, and interleaving. Frequency extension is only part of the story.

Electronics and measurement hardware discern all of that (all of what the ear does) via frequency extension capacity -only.

The ear does not do it that way.

eg, a tube amp that cannot go above 20khz or even 15khz, without a reduction in level..,it can still do a two channel timing interval difference of an easy 1mhz. or...one millionth of a second of difference. Ie, a transient can be pulsed through one channel and then pulsed through the other and be timed at one millionth of a second part.

ie, a LP or record, can do -approximately- (properly set up, at it’s limits) a 7 millionth of a second interval in inter channel timing (of signal). This is why a record can outclass 192khz audio, as it does things that are important to how humans hear. Digital is very poor in the area that is important to the ear. The seven millionth of a second number, is the approximate physical limit of the mechanics of an LP and stylus combination. (then all the work that came before the record was made real, all those ducks have to be lined up as perfect as possible, in order to really bring this point to life--in the given LP record)

For the ear, that is the important part. Frequency extension means almost nothing.

The ear can do complex harmonic interleaved signal discernment to the tune of many hundreds of kilohertz (hundreds of thousandths of second), in each ear. It can then combine that between the ears,and individually in each ear.

Ergo...it is very sensitive to jitter, as that is almost....the whole art of hearing itself. This part never leaves the ear, it remains even when frequency extension of the ear diminishes radically. The capacity to hear multiple levels and interleavings of 100khz and +200khz complex harmonic structures together, with zero jitter issues - is always there.Then the mind/biology connected to the individual ear, how good are those individual packages - and as a set?

Yes, an 80 year old man, a learned and lore filled audiophile version of that 80 year old man... with diminished high frequency hearing... via listening...can accurately tell you which digital cable has the lesser level of picoseconds of differential in production and navigation of jitter. FACT.

This is how an older man of 80 with hearing loss and a loss measured to be a serious drop at over lets say, 5khz, can still tell the differences between a good or a bad tweeter design.

Again, frequency extension of electronics or measurement means almost nothing....as the ear does not work that way. The ear is not a piece of human engineering of hardware. It is a totally different acting and operating piece of incredibly complex biology.

One can measure but one has to measure and compare what is important. So far, electronic measurement and human hearing as a coupled system of relation (to attempt scientific discernment for the purpose of application of engineering), is almost missing the whole boat.

Various people, at times, over the decades... have tried to explain this to the audiophile masses but the people have to ’get it’ as well, for it to sink in and become a very much needed norm. We’re getting there, but it is slow rowing out here in the desert...

This is the start of the necessary point of discernment in figuring this out. It gets more complex than that, but this is most definitely a doorway to that discernment. The map is not the territory but first one has to at least draw a map that is connected to the territory. Otherwise you’ll get this circular argument that has been here for decades.

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To me, none of this means anything if you are not having a good time listening to music.