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RE: Age-related hearing loss mysteries

Posted by Inmate51 on March 22, 2017 at 10:24:29:
Good points. Although, some maybe a little off-target. I had the opportunity to listen to Bub Ludwig a couple years ago at AES in L.A. He opened my ears to a certain type of lossy compression distortion which most of us wouldn't notice except in the extreme. Well, he played the "extreme" sample, and then subsequently less and less compression (data, not level), and even at very low levels of compression, it was still audible. This is a classic case of learning to hear something, and then being able to hear it even when you hadn't before, because now you know what to listen for! Bob and I chatted briefly later, and he is a very nice guy.
Our good friend John Curl recently turned 70-"something" ;). Yet, he's quite capable of hearing small differences between an SACD and LP album of the same recording.
This brings me to a very important point: It's not the ability to hear high frequencies which is most important, but rather our ability to hear and understand differences in tonality and definition. Here, when I say "definition", I mean the difference between "pop" and "paaaap". Most musical instruments don't produce much energy above about 10-12 KHz. Even when they do, we're talking about a very small amount of 2 or 3 more harmonics. People who know about musical instrument harmonics know this.
To your point about mastering...
Mastering has more to do with making every track have the same overall level and the same "sound" than hyper-nit-picking over details.
Gotta go. More later.
:)