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?
