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RE: Number of reasons, not the last of which...

Yet there's a lot of consistency in ranking order when listeners are asked to rank loudspeakers in blind tests. In fact, expert and untrained listeners rank the speakers in the same order. The exception to that is the group that has significant hearing loss under 1 kHz, which is apparently 20%(!) of the population. They don't rank loudespeakers in the same order as everyone else. In fact, they don't even rank loudspeakers in the same order as themselves, in that their ranking of a given loudspeaker is inconsistent.

The wag in me is tempted to say "That explains a lot."

Interestingly, Toole didn't find that high frequency hearing loss interfered with the ranking order of loudspeakers. This result actually seems a bit off to me, since now that I'm middle aged I know that I'm less sensitive to phenomena like high frequency beaming. It may have been an artifact of the test, if all the listening took place in a chair on axis and the speakers they chose weren't particularly beamy.

In general, though, apart from the loss of sensitivity -- I'm no longer going to be able to tell the difference between a speaker that drops off at 17 kHz and one that drops off at 20 kHz -- I don't think the change in HF sensitivity matters all that much since the brain tends to measure loudspeakers against what it hears live. So the brain is in effect recalibrated to the current response curve of the ear.

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  Kimber Kable  

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