High End Audio and Your hearing as you get older

>>> 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.

Djohson54,

I was being facetious. No, make that snarky since I don't believe test tones are the end all when it comes to measurements on what and how we hear. You are right that with a great set of headphones, I could narrow down the actual limits to my 'hearing' of test tones but when it comes to music and all the harmonics inherent in music, those test tones can be set aside.

Nonoise, sorry, I missed the sarcasm. Yes, I agree about the harmonics and as I said earlier, frequency response isn't nearly everything. Unsound is correct about the noise and it even goes beyond that. Audiologists use sealed headphones with a known frequency response. The headphones don't have to be flat or even totally accurate; they just have to have a frequency response that is known and reproducible. That way the deviations from flat can be compensated for with loudness during the test. This is the same principle that the Rives test tone CD uses with the known and (hopefully) consistent deviations from flat response of the Radio Shack SPL meter.