Aging ears and Nuances

Interesting discussion.  I am 66 and feel I am only getting better at listening to and distinguishing subtle differences in music and music reproduction systems even as my hearing acuity in general has declined some - evidenced by greater difficulty following conversations in noisy echoing environments.   This both due to greater experience and the fact that the spectrum of most reproduced music occurs below 10kHz.  Only violins and cymbals extend much above 10kHz for acoustic instruments.  The bulk of the important information is in the midrange, and if timing is your thing - it’s all there.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3088642/

kn

PS - plus one for using care with headphone volume levels.

@jourdoktorn Thanks.

"Sounds good enough" gets tossed around a bunch in my listening room nowadays. Just turned 60, hearing up to about 13K, and the mundane idiotic minutia of minute differences in sound quality (which used to get my pecker up) bore me to tears anymore.

But I still love the hell out of music and enjoy it the same, which is good.

 @rankaudio   If your friend has been subjected to a lot of loud noise all their life, and has some serious loss of sound, then maybe, but loss of upper frequencies and nuances, um, maybe he's just tired of dealing with equipment, or was not as hardcore an audiophile as you thought.  Or, perhaps other things in his life may take precedence over stereo equipment.  I could see that.