High End Audio and Your hearing as you get older

As a 50 year old motorcyclist, I would like to say that with earplugs, your hearing doesn't have to suffer. Also, a windshield very often makes the wind noise much louder, as it concentrates all the wind that would be hitting your chest onto your face.

YMMV of course, especially if you can't resist the urge to use all that horsepower ;)

Mitch4t, we can still hope that there's another period like 1950-1970, where every young male had to have a good sound system. The recent interest in vinyl is a good sign. If there's a renaissance of interest in good sound, maybe the mainstream audio industry will start competing on quality again instead of features, and Walmart WILL have decent-sounding reasonably priced systems in ten or twenty years . . . But if you're turning 70 next year, sorry, ain't gonna happen:)

I think regardless of how your hearing gradually decays over time, good equipment will sound more like live music and real instruments than poorer equipment - you still have a standard for comparison, though your range has narrowed, there remains something akin to the Absolute Sound for you, and the hearing acuity you have, to judge your equipment and recordings.

Unsound,
I believe I didn't explain it correctly and misled you. Its not great gaps in my hearing that my brain is filing in. That point was to illustrate a bigger level of impairment which I don't have. You are spot on with the remainder: the levels of enjoyment, though different for all, are all capable of growth and refinement.

Unsound, I think you example of the balance in salad dressing is spot on. Not to be too mystical but, to me, balance is important in most everything.

As far as others' discussion declining hearing being a problem, it has already been mentioned that there is FAR more to hearing than just frequency response - distortion, timbre, harmonic presentation, etc. As someone else mentioned, I have trouble picking out voices in a noisy environment, but put me in front of my system in a quiet room and things are wonderful. Add to this the likelihood that we all hear things differently and anything more than generalization becomes difficult if not impossible.