For older audiophiles

This seems relevant to this topic:

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I’ll tell you how. More of the sounds I hear are annoying. Especially when younger people are moving their lips.

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LOLOL, Now that’s the statement of the day.

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We can agree that the brain is the most important element in the audiophile hearing chain. My experience is that although I have tinnitus I find that listening to music with the highest sound quality possibly improves my hearing perception.

Perhaps this is because I am sensitive to any distortion. The high frequencies are not present for me, so by far the most important quality in recorded music is timbre. I have gone to great lengths in pursuit.

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Well said and pretty spot on . LOL

Found this excerpt in Audioholics and found it interesting. If true, this explains a lot.

ā€œHearing vs Age by Gene DellaSala

As we get older, our ability to hear high frequencies diminish by the following rate:

20925 - (age x 166) = max Frequency you can hear.

IE. An average person of age 45 has an upper limit of hearing at around 13.45kHz. Food for thought when you see older audiophiles debating the merits of exotic cables and how they affect the sound of their systems.ā€

So I guess I can ignore the right side of the frequency response graphs. :thinking:

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Also, exposure to loud noises increased dramatically during the industrial age. People started being exposed to manufacturing equipment, steam engines, gas/diesel engines in cars and motorcycles, rock concerts, and guns/military combat. And after this people started wearing stereo headsets for hours daily, starting with the Sony Walkman in the 1980s.

Average hearing follows from the technology of the era, work requirements, and personal interests. The average is likely a lot lower than it was 100 or 200 years ago, and may be higher or lower in some subgroups. One acoustic/vocals music professor sued in 1999 because he developed hearing issues after a single loud concert.

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I’m curious as to where you got that equation.

If one chooses to believe that cables make a difference, then one could also choose to believe that they make a difference across the entire frequency range, so even at age 50 a set of $40k speaker cables add more ā€˜slam’ and ā€˜microdynamics’ to the system.

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According to that formula, I should just about be able to make out :phone: the dial tone.

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Pretty much, but not for this reason alone. Most rigs are not accurate above 10khz, we don’t really know what ā€œneutralā€ is at those frequencies, and user preference varies wildly anyway.

I respect Gene and Audioholics, but that equation seems pessimistic to me. Also it’s not so much of a can/can’t hear as more like your sensitivity declines. There’s also often a dip in sensitivity around 11khz.

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The equation came from Gene DellaSala at Audioholics in an article comparing Tidal to Qobuz

Editorial Note: Hearing versus Age

I’ll be 70 next month and I’m currently around 12khz or just close to it. MY advice to younger people, do not listen to loud music or loud noises without some type of protection or common sense. There IS NO CURE, unless you just want to wear a hearing aid throughout life and miss out on the wonders of music and those voices that you just might love…

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There is a formula, which is followed by almost all physicians, which has been stated already here.
The statistical prove, which almost all person of a certain age follow univocally, is strictly by biological age. Strangly enough many older ā€œaudiophilesā€ still believe they can hear frequencies, which are proven over tenth of years, that are not relevant any more, because they won’t be able to physically ā€œhearā€ them. At an age of ~70 years the majority of people won’t be able to barely hear frequencies beyond 9kHz, most can just hear 8 kHz, the upper frequency a physician will check routinally with his existing equipment.

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Um. Does that include audiophile physicians?

Why not ? :grinning: It counts for all ages no matter what professions, but all measurements are being done with instruments, which are rather ā€œobjectiveā€ in this sense…

Are you referring to this research and chart:

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I’d not characterize it as strict so much as probabilistic and a fade out, but the general point is correct. Hearing declines with age.

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Agreed. I used to be able to hear an ant’s :ant: footsteps at 50 paces if there wasn’t too much highway noise in the background. Now I can only hear the footsteps on the near side of the ant.

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I’m referring to that formula: 20925 - (age x 166) = max Frequency
It describes the statistical mean of the max. frequency an older person should still hear at his age… :slight_smile:
Naturally I am speaking of an average person without any illnesses (prior or currently) of his hearing abilities.

20925 āˆ’ (52 * 166) = 12,293 … so I shouldn’t be able to hear above 12 khz?!

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