I pulled this form another thread as I have been quite interested in the subject for sometime and thought it deserved it's own thread instead of derailing yet another thread with an Off Topic ramble.
As with everything else in life aging is a function of genes and wear and tear. Typically females hear more acutely than males do. (But for some reason don't seem to get the audio bug like we do.) We do not all start out with the same level of hearing ability (more of the genes part) and as we age our hearing slowly degrades. If you are an avid hunter, a musician who played loud amplified music, or if you worked in a noisy machine shop or other noisy industrial environment you will very likely have damaged your hearing. (Accelerated the aging of them.) Here are guidelines for us to delay or reduce hearing loss. I took this from an Audiology website:Originally Posted by Gary L
Preventing Presbycusis (Hearing Loss due to Aging)
If you don't have a hearing problem, taking the following steps may help reduce your chances of developing one. And if you already have presbycusis, following these guidelines may help you keep the problem from getting worse.
- Avoid loud or prolonged exposure to noise.
- When you can't avoid noise, wear ear protection.
- If your ears produce excessive earwax, have your ears cleaned periodically by a health care professional. (Do not use cotton swabs, as you will lodge more earwax even deeper into the ear canal than the small amount of wax you will remove.)
- Avoid ototoxic drugs. If you're taking one already, talk with your doctor and see if there's a less-ototoxic alternative.
- Stay healthy and be mindful of risk factors, such as hypertension.
How does our hearing roll off due to age?
Obviously it varies from individual to individual... but it typically starts up top and works down. At 18 I could hear a 20KHz sinewave... today at 47, I can barely hear a 16KHz sinewave.
Being able to hear TV, the telephone, and general speech intelligibility requires hearing up to about 5KHz... above that are only overtones and harmonics. They are incredibly valuable for flushing out the difference between different instruments and adding spatial ques and general "reality" to the music, but I suppose if you no longer hear them in live music, you won't miss them if they are lacking from your Hi-Fi.
Speaker cable, interconnects, and electronics? I have yet to hear a speaker cable that "improved" the sound. There are some that mess around with the sound, but good quality copper all sounds the same to me and to many of the people that I have talked to... some are of the "golden eared" set. Interconnects tend to have more of an impact, but even here... the clearly superior interconnect is rare. With both interconnects and speaker wire the quality of the connection is more important the the wire in between. Electronics do have a marked effect on the sound... simple high quality electronics tend to sound superior to heavily feature laden pieces of equipment.
Back on the subject of hearing and aging and anecdotal evidence...
I have had two older forum members over at my house at different times while I was testing tweeters. In both cases while taking an impedance measurement of the tweeters they were swept with sinewave pulses starting at 22KHz and sliding down the scale I heard nothing until the 16KHz frequency was pulsed. These two individuals heard nothing until below 10KHz... one first heard the signal at around 9.5KHz and the other around 9KHz.
Based on this info we might write off their hearing above 10KHz and think that they don't need a speaker that responds above that frequency. That was certainly my first thought. However as I have spent time with both of these individuals and talked about specific drivers, their sonic signatures, and simply what has worked and what hasn't... it has become apparent that they both did hear above the 10KHz point. The only conclusion that I could make was that with music as a source, we are able to hear higher frequencies than we do when listening to pure sinewaves.
Another anecdote:
I had my hearing tested not too long ago by a friend who is a pediatrician. She measured my hearing and was surprised to discover that I could not only pass the test at all frequencies (up to the 8KHz limit), but that my hearing was at the threshold of her machine... most of the children that she measures are not that good. I guess the years of my misspent youth blasting the hell out of several large JBL systems didn't hurt me too much.
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