If there are golden ears it isn't the hearing ability that is golden it's the ability of the listener to interpret and to what he can hear and to retain as much of it in memory. It's the brain and the listener's experience and concentration that may be golden. The actual hearing of the ear is way down the list.
Correct. We don't even know how to test even the most rudimentary aspects of hearing. We use test tones and this leads us to say high frequency hearing declines with age. But read up on it, this tests only the inner ear cells that detect tones like sine waves. There are THREE TIMES as many that detect transients and timing, they involve frequencies much higher than 20kHz (which is why supertweeters work) and these it seems DO NOT decline with age.
Case in point. Actual real world demonstration. Discovered by accident. One of the XLO demagnetizing tracks is a sweep tone that goes to 20kHz. To my ears it trails off to nothing but one audiophile is screaming how it hurts his ears. Really? You hear that? Yeah! Tell me when you no longer hear it. And he goes to darn near 20kHz!
We didn't do a test to see if it was the Moab or the Townshend Supertweeter he was hearing. Doesn't matter. Point is, he not only heard that sine wave it was excruciatingly loud.
Yet when we played music on that same system, no problem. Hearing is completely different for sine waves as complex music sounds. We are not microphones. We do not record acoustic phenomena. Music is a human experience. Listening is an intellectual activity.