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The research suggests that it doesn't much matter

The Harman research found that ability to rank loudspeakers wasn't affected by a reasonable amount of age-related hearing loss, in that the group with it ranked loudspeakers in the same order as everyone else.

What did damage the ability to rank loudspeakers was a loss of as little as 10 dB down in the 1 kHz area, which is surprisingly common in all age segments of the population. People with that kind of hearing loss rate loudspeakers idiosyncratically and inconsistently.

So now, when we meet those audiophiles who have really weird tastes, we can harbor the secret suspicion that they're deaf. In that case, an audiology test would be useful -- but how many readers would know how to interpret the results? More likely, people would make the same kind of mistake they make when they look at the test results in Stereophile, forgetting that what looks bad on paper doesn't always sound bad and vice-versa.

Anyway, I doubt though that someone with that kind of hearing loss would get very far as an audio critic. Unless he started his own magazine, LOL.

In one respect, though, I do agree with you -- we middle aged or older guys shouldn't be reviewing the top octave. I remember feeling as a kid that a lot of high frequency crap that drove me crazy -- msitracking, beaming tweeters, pilot tone FM Stereo -- would be fixed if middle-aged engineers could hear what I did. Now that I'm a middle-aged engineer myself, and am no longer nearly as bothered by those problems as I was then, I've decided that I was right. So middle-aged critics -- and engineers -- should call in someone who still has good top octave hearing to evaluate what they can't.

But I for one would trust the experienced ears of an older critic over the more acute but less experienced hearing of someone who's just starting out.

In my experience, what matters is that the critic hears the same things I do and has tastes similar to my own. And the only way to determine that is to read some of his reviews of equipment with which I'm familiar, and see if he makes the same observations, and expresses the same preferences, that I did. More often than not, I find that they do.


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  • The research suggests that it doesn't much matter - josh358 08:24:44 11/21/11 (0)

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