Whether to do anything about the limitations of our ears


In the thread 'How do you listen?' appears the following:

"We do not hear all frequencies equally well at all volume levels. Low bass and high treble in particular need to be at a fairly high level to be heard at all."

This asks a big question:

Should we listen as our ears hear, with their inability to apprehend all audio band frequencies at the same intensity? As we are of course compelled to do when listening to live music.

Or when listening to recorded music should we adjust the intensity of particular frequencies we don't hear so well?  This will of course give a different presentation from what we hear live.

Or, to put it a different way, should audio manufacturers design equipment to present the frequency range as flat as a microphone perceives it, or as our ears perceive it?

But a microphone is just another flawed ear, with its own imperfections as regards intensity across the audio frequency range (and others of course).

Or, again: a flat response can be flat only as the means of listening presents it.



128x128clearthinker
I recent years  I have developed a hearing "defect"  becoming very sensitive to sibilance. I changed a beautiful pair of speakers because they were too bright yet most others I have tried sound too dull. Each person will hear sound differently to you, possibly very differently. I have thus listened to speakers people tell me are great, but they sound awful to me. In the end I found a brand ( I have two pairs in separate systems) that do not sound sibilant, to me they are great speakers, reviews vary but generally are good to very good for them, Audio Physic (Yara Classic 2, and Sitara 25). I visit a number of hifi stores who frequently tell me x will sound better, they never do, to me, they have too much sibilance. Your ears are your ears no-one can tell you what you will hear or what you will prefer.

Thanks to all who have posted.

onhwy61
I was remarking the U47 (as an example) is very flat compared to speakers and phono carts.  So I don't need to know that other mikes are even flatter!!  You just help make my point.

Miller, rude as usual, and you are off-point.  I've got plenty between the ears thanks.  I was not replying to your post, I was picking up a point from it.  That's why it's in a new thread.

Tomic601
You are off-point.


Other posters demonstrate a strong preference for adjusting the the presentation to cope with human ear limitations at the ends of the audible range, they say to make the programme more to their personal liking.

This is interesting since the experience will be unlike listening to live music.  So many audiophiles don't want 'the closest approach to the original sound' after all.  Does this change everything?  This issue is the reason for my OP.
The question you ask can be viewed from many levels. I would suggest the recording engineering level is where you should start your study to learn the answer to your question.

I have a couple of book shelves full of books on the subject of  Psychoacoustics, many of the books are rare. Half these books are above the level of an audio engineering degree from a non ABET accredited school. Psychoacoustics is the scientific study of sound perception and audiology. You can expect it to take 5 to 6 years to learn something about the subject spending 10's of thousands of dollars. Mostly what you will discover is there are more questions to be answered. Enjoy.
The adjustments are for speaker and room interaction. You're not going to get a "live music" listening experience at home unless you have a live performance Hall. What is being reproduced is the original sound of the  recording not the event.
As a young person with healthy, maybe above average hearing acuity I would encounter older folks with declining acuity and thought that whatever their hearing filter was, they perceived live music through it and reproduced music through it too, so why would their judgement of what speaker was better at recreating that sound differ from mine?  I neglected to consider their accumulated lifetime memory of how things sounded to them.  I also didn’t realize hearing loss can be asymmetrical and can include the presence of high levels of masking noise, not just the roll off of higher frequencies.  Unfortunately I now know these to be true!