Golden Ears?


Elsewhere I have discussed by recent audiology results.  To summarize I have a fairly severe high frequency loss and have ordered hearing aids.  I was not surprised as for years I have had problems understanding people in loud environments such as crowded restaurants.

  I asked the audiologist how this would affect music appreciation and she said basically that bass and midrange would be relatively well preserved but treble loss would occur.  I tried to console myself with the knowledge that my speakers are considered “bright “ so I was probably ok.  The day after the test I was at a wind band concert that featured a lot of percussion.  One piece very prominently featured a triangle, with the player being spotlight on the stage and whacking the thing with great fervor, and I’m sitting in the third row and didn’t hear the instrument at all.  
  Listening to music, I still seem to be able to distinguish between levels of piano and forte, to be able to appreciate the overtones of brass and string instruments.  I have to acknowledge that while oboe and clarinet seem relatively unimpeded, solo flute has sounded comparatively muffled.  Piano, my favorite instrument and one with lots of treble, still sounds ok, but I must be missing a lot there. 
  So all that is under discussion in a different thread, and I summarized it for those who may want to participate in this thread but haven’t seem the previous.  My point of this thread is is to ask an uncomfortable question.  Given that most of us here are contemporaries, and have spent a lot of time listening to music, I know that I am not alone with this deficit .  A while ago there was a thread demanding that people post pictures of their systems.  The tone of the thread was that people who did not do so must have substandard systems and therefore were somehow unqualified to venture opinions on all audio matters.  While I was one of the naysayers who found this assumption dubious (I posted my system anyway), doesn’t it make more sense to require people to post their audiograms?  After all, what good is owning a million dollar system if the sensory organs to which they feed the information cannot adequately process it?  Or does this not matter, and if so, why not?

  

mahler123

Yep, we all lose some HF as we age. Some fix it with hearing aids, some with tone controls, some just adjust their system set up. All work to some degree. But, FWIW, a good headphone system, for me, is far more feasible. With my main system I note the loss of HF clearly and it diminishes the music as well as the sense of spaciousness. But not so much, if at all, with my headphone system, which does not (!) reduce the music to a more mono signal. I get good channel separation, and while it's not as good as I used to hear my speaker system, presently it is not only better, it really allows me to get lost in the music. But the key, I think, is that it is a headphone system, not just plugging any headphone into a component. FWIW.  

Sorry for your loss.

Small amounts of hearing loss (most often in the very high frequencies) to a very experienced listener have very little impact on enjoyment and skills in assessing audio systems. My female partner has always had better hearing than myself. The primary difference was that she did not enjoy listening the very high frequency hash in solid state systems decades ago.

 

 

@mikelavigne 

Hows about 8 kHz. The term is presbycusis. Medicine does not consider hearing loss to be significant until it affects frequencies below 8 kHz which can affect speech perception. Many older audiophiles have virtually nothing above 12 kHz and they do not even notice any loss. I find it interesting that many Sound Labs owners love the Atma-Sphere MA 2. Because of it's highish output impedance the speakers roll of rapidly over 12 kHz and the owners  do not seem to notice. The midrange and midbass are glorious but there is a distinct lack of sparkle. You'll hear the sound described as dark. 

At any rate, the enjoyment of music should not change, if you really enjoy music. If it has to sound just so, you might be in trouble. But, there are other aspects of aging that I find more difficult to accommodate to. First and foremost is erectile performance.  

The most important  impediment related to age is not hertz resolution by the ears nor erectile performance it is the closing of the mind in ready made opinions ...

These ready made opinions can affect hearing and erectile functions too ...

@OP, regardng your difficulty hearing flutes, this may be because depending on how it's played, a flute can get pretty close to a pure sine wave i.e. it has few harmonics. A piano is the diametric opposite so even if you have a loss in a particular frequency range, you will still hear more of the piano's sound.

Re the question in the post, critical listening ability is a learned skill and it takes a lot of hearing damage to negate it. Or put conversely, full bandwidth hearing ability does not correlate with a capacity to listen critically.