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Aging and Treble and Income?

I'm in my late 50s; been listening to, and playing, music for most of my life. I still occasionally haunt the salons, but these days not to buy new gear; more just curiosity about developments in our wonderful hobby. These days I just buy music; records, CDs and the odd download.
I was listening to a very expensive system recently, a combination of an excellent digital front end, feeding an exotic tube array of components, and outputting via a beautifully constructed set of English high-end speakers.
A very impressive sound to say the least. Not like real music though: very very good hi-fi, but not real.
One of the obvious oddities was the frequency response above maybe 4k. Just incorrect. Very clear, very emphasised and incisive, no doubt, but not right.
And it occured to me that this isn't unusual. And then a set of questions came to me. For the purposes of this debate I will exclude the 128k iPod generation - their tastes in listening are their own, and as much driven by budget as space constraint as anything else. I prefer to concentrate on the generation that has increased leisure and disposable income. It's a sad fact that this generation is plagued by the inevitability of progressive hearing loss, most often accompanied by diminished ability to hear higher frequencies. But it's this generation that can afford the 'best' equipment.

My question is simply this: is it not possible (or highly likely) that the higher-end industry is driven by the need to appeal to those whose hearing is degrading? In other words, is there a leaning towards the building-in of a compensatory frequency emphasis in much of what is on the shelves? My question is simplistic, and the industry may indeed be governed by the relentless pursuit of accuracy and musicality, but so much that I have hear is, I find, very difficult to listen to as it is so far from what I believe to be reality. Perhaps there has always been an emphasis in making our sytems sound "exciting" as opposed to "honest": I can understand the pleasure in this pursuit, as it's the delight in technology itself and I see nothing very wrong in that. But, all this emphasised treble....I just wonder if anyone out there in cyberspace agrees with me?
57s4me
djohnson54
396 posts
 
I'd be willing to bet that it has more to do with the fact that flash sells product and tipped up treble seems like flash at first. Once you own it, it's your problem if it becomes irritating. I'm in my mid-50s and I've come to realize over the years that good sound is MUCH more than just frequency extension. I can't fully explain it but I know what sounds good to me (and what sounds like crap). My Merlin VSMs won't pressurize a room with bass but they are exceptional where it counts. I also know I've got some hearing loss though it hasn't been measured - I especially have problems when background noise is present (nerve deafness?). When things in the house are quiet though, the music really blooms (my wife jokes about needing to run her "small appliances" every time I sit down to listen).

P.S. - I think there's a similar problem with mastering engineers on many of today's recordings - they know what sells and they produce it that way.
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,229 posts
 
The situation in high end audio is similar to exotic cars. Unless your daddy was rich, for most people by the time they're able to afford one of those expensive German or Italian supercars they no longer have the youthful vigor to drive them anywhere near their limits. The modern lifestyle usually means a person's hearing is in decline by the time they reach 30, or even earlier. Driving, headphone listening, airplanes, subways, rock concerts, bars, guns, motorcycles, etc. are all high SPL activities or environments.

I believe speaker designers have known for decades that a little bump in the 4-8kHz range translates into added detail. Also most speakers in a home environment suffer from the floor bounce induce lower midrange/upper bass suckout. Couple that with an uptilt in the lower treble and the speaker's in room balance will be noticeably light. On top of all this is the problem of wide dispersion tweeters giving speakers a flat in room power response which, IMO, is wrong, particularly for acoustic oriented music.

Here's a link to an essay by Robert Greene where he spells out the problems of tonal balance inherent in modern recordings due to instrument design and recording techniques.
57s4me OP
30 posts
 
Onhwy61 - Thanks for the reference to the Robert Greene essay; this is a compelling analysis, and answers many questions I have had.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,308 posts
 
The Greene article is very good!

It always helps to consider aspects of audio "perspective", ie what is heard differently at different locations relative to the source, both in a recording, to the extent possible based on any recording notes and what you hear relative to listening live at various locations in various kinds of venue, and also in your listening room based on the geometry of your listening location relative to speakers in the room and room acoustics, including effects of various speaker locations.

Of course studio recordings in particular are often a black box in regards to information provided about how recorded, you can only listen and make educated guesses perhaps.

It can take a while to get a handle on it all, but lots of fun for a serious listener along the way and worth the effort!
csontos
1,311 posts
 
Sorry, didn't mean to highjack the thread. It's just that as Mapman confirmed and David12 referenced, distortion can skew an otherwise well laid out/engineered listening space whether it's deliberate or not. I really don't think a quality speaker is ever going to be the culprit since they always have a descending response. No matter how good the amp or source, there's always going to be a degree of sibilance which seems to me to be where the the answer lies. Vocal clarity is the toughest to achieve and the effort to do so may be an incidental consequence to the overall response of an amp. On the other hand, there's a marked difference between vinyl/analogue and digital sources. The latter seeming to be tipped up but imo only those that are vinyl conversions. However, I may very well be one of those old farts they're compensating for.
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