Are you too old to be an audiophile?

1. Hearing merely begins at the ears. It is a brain process. The sustained interest older audiophiles have devoted to the hobby results in knowledge and expertise that ENHANCES the brain process of hearing. This fact more than makes up for older listeners' diminished frequency perception. I suspect this is what Elizabeth was alluding to when she said that there's an important difference between hearing and listening.

2. Perhaps older audiophiles would be at a significant disadvantage if technical listening were reducible to hearing frequency response. Thankfully, it is not. In addition to hearing frequency response, there is also hearing transient response, harmonic accuracy, resolution, soundstaging, PRaT, dynamics, coherence, etc.. Diminished high frequency perception might have some effect on the perception of each of those characteristics, but NONE of them is reducible to frequency response.

3. In addition to the TECHNICAL characteristics just mentioned, the appreciation of music is most importantly a matter of listening to its AESTHETIC characteristics: its beauty, emotion, interpretation, authenticity, imagery, etc.. The appreciation of those aesthetic characteristics is largely learned through experience. That would give older listeners another potential advantage over younger ones.

IMO, frequency response is one of the most over-valued characteristics among a particular segment of audiophiles. Likewise for frequency perception.

Bryon

04-12-11: Douglas_schroeder
In a similar fashion to the example of arthritis negatively impacting the running, hearing loss has a real world consequences.

You make some good observations, Douglas, but I'm not sure I reach the same conclusions you do. Maybe I'm unclear about your view on what is, IMO, the critical question of this thread...

For audiophiles, what is the average peak age of technical listening?

By "technical listening," I mean something like: the ability to discriminate differences in resolution, frequency response, transient response, harmonic accuracy, dynamic range, imaging, soundstaging, PRaT, coherence, and so on. The contrast to *technical* listening is *aesthetic* listening, which is something like: the ability to discriminate differences in interpretation, emotion, authenticity, imagery, beauty, and so on.

I say "average peak age" because some audiophiles probably peak later than others, just like marathoners. But still it may be possible to generalize about an age range of peak performance for audiophiles, just as we can generalize about the age range of peak performance for marathoners.

With that in mind, I suspect that, for audiophiles, the average peak age of technical listening lies somewhere in the broad range between 35 and 60. Some reasons I suspect that...

1. While fluid intelligence starts to decrease at around the age of 25, crystallized intelligence increases up until the mid to late 60's. I believe that technical listening is mostly *acquired* knowledge and expertise, and hence a form of crystallized intelligence, which increases with age. When fluid and crystallized intelligence are averaged together, the average peak age is somewhere between 35 and 60, which is the range I have speculated for the average peak performance of technical listening. Admittedly, this is a guess.

2. While age correlates with intellectual and artistic *productivity*, it does NOT correlate with intellectual or artistic *quality*, as judged by the ages at which intellectual and artistic masterworks are produced. In other words, as people age, they do less, but they don't do it less well. The studies that demonstrate this include the works of classical composers, FWIW.

3. As everyone knows, age related hearing loss is principally a consequence of damage to the hairs/cells of the ear, typically resulting in diminished high frequency perception. But the perception of an audio system's frequency response is only one element of technical listening. Technical listening is also a matter of the perception of an audio system's transient response, resolution, harmonic accuracy, dynamic range, imaging, soundstaging, PRaT, coherence, and so on. There is little reason to believe that age-related hearing loss results in a significant diminishment of the ability to discriminate those characteristics. Hence I believe that the bulk of technical listening remains largely unaffected by age-related hearing loss. The reason, I suspect, is that technical listening isn't principally something that happens "in the ears." It's principally something that happens in the brain.

For these reasons, and others I haven't mentioned, I believe that, for audiophiles, the average peak age of technical listening is older than some posters on this thread seem to suggest.

Bryon

P.S. FWIW, I am younger than 40.