High End Audio and Your hearing as you get older

Unsound, I do believe we hear things differently as our hearing diminishes. The balance of the sound would almost have to change some but, with our ears and brain being more sensitive to the midrange frequencies, it may not affect our hearing as much as we might think. The brain has an amazing ability to compensate for that sort of thing.

On a related note, I have often wondered if much of us older folks' appreciation for LPs is due to the fact that we can no longer hear as many of the crackles and pops that used to irritate us in our younger days.

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.

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! :)

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.

Pryso, no, no such beliefs about RS. That's why I added the "hopefully" in my comment. However, the Rives test CD does rely on that consistency as you're supposed to measure the absolute levels and then add/subtract the known deviations from flat OR use the set of test tones that are pre-calibrated to those deviations. I'm sure it works reasonably well even if it's not perfect, and it's certainly cheaper than the alternative of a professional, calibrated meter.