High End Audio and Your hearing as you get older

Yes, you're right. Here are the graphs and it wasn't a typo:
http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?t=58868

I'm surprised to see so many fundamentals at such a high frequency!

Anyway, to answer your question, yes, limiting freq response to 15 kHz is easily audible when your ears are young. FM stereo cuts off at that frequency, and when I was a kid it sounded dull to me. Not sure if I could hear the difference now (I no longer have a serious tuner).

I remember hearing, in elementary school, the 15.750 Hz squeal from the flyback transformer when somone turned on a TV four stories down from me. Also how wretched even the best LP's sounded to me because of the high frequency tracking distortion. I thought then that the reason it was so egregious was that so many engineers and reviewers were middle aged, and now that I'm middle aged myself, I think that I was right. We can still judge sound quality, but, obviously, only to the extent that it affects the range at which we have good sensitivity.

In that context, it's interesting to note that Toole found that people with HF frequency loss were able to accurately rank the quality of loudspeakers -- that is, the rankings didn't differ from the rankings made by those without HF loss -- but that people with sensitivity loss > 10 dB below 1 kHz were not. Their loudspeaker rankings were idiosyncratic and inconsistent. Apparently, a surprisingly high percentage of the population has hearing loss of that type.

>>> but wondering if when I'm 70, all this hi-fi stuff will sound the same as mid-fi stuff to a pair of old ears.<<<

Maybe/maybe not. I'll still use the same formula I always have: If the sound draws me in (and I can afford it) I'll buy it. Be nice if the mid-fi does it for me, I could go on more trips :-)

Wow, now I'm going to sell all my equipment as I "can't" hear anything from 14Khz on up. But there is more to test signals than that.

Nonoise, how did you determine that you couldn't hear anything higher than that. To be accurate this really needs to be done with calibrated headphones. If you tested with computer speakers, I'm surprised you heard anything at 14KHz no matter how good your hearing! :)

Djohnson54 brings up a good point, my laptop fan noise can sometimes be quite overwhelming.