Can You Hear Me Now

If there are golden ears it isn't the hearing ability that is golden it's the ability of the listener to interpret and to what he can hear and to retain as much of it in memory. It's the brain and the listener's experience and concentration that may be golden. The actual hearing of the ear is way down the list.

Correct. We don't even know how to test even the most rudimentary aspects of hearing. We use test tones and this leads us to say high frequency hearing declines with age. But read up on it, this tests only the inner ear cells that detect tones like sine waves. There are THREE TIMES as many that detect transients and timing, they involve frequencies much higher than 20kHz (which is why supertweeters work) and these it seems DO NOT decline with age. 

Case in point. Actual real world demonstration. Discovered by accident. One of the XLO demagnetizing tracks is a sweep tone that goes to 20kHz. To my ears it trails off to nothing but one audiophile is screaming how it hurts his ears. Really? You hear that? Yeah! Tell me when you no longer hear it. And he goes to darn near 20kHz! 

We didn't do a test to see if it was the Moab or the Townshend Supertweeter he was hearing. Doesn't matter. Point is, he not only heard that sine wave it was excruciatingly loud.

Yet when we played music on that same system, no problem. Hearing is completely different for sine waves as complex music sounds. We are not microphones. We do not record acoustic phenomena. Music is a human experience. Listening is an intellectual activity.

Coincidentally, my listening room was built by my next door neighbor, Michael Framer.

One year at CES there was a problem with the PA. I was way in back of the packed room but saw the commotion, the running around trying to find the problem. One guy in the middle of the room says something. Everyone pays attention.

Nobody believes me when I tell this story. People with tin ears all want to think they're all there is. Vast majority, tin.

This story proves it. Whole room, at least 100 audiophiles, everyone hearing the same thing and it is just like here, majority nowhere even close. The one guy was right. And I was too far away to see it, all I know is it took a soldering iron. (Last time I told this someone says soldering iron, no way! CES, people. Yes way.) Sound comes back, whatever it was is fixed. Eventually word filters clear back to me, the guy who identified the problem by ear was Stan Ricker.

Now I am no Stan Ricker. But I have been saying if you know how to listen then you can indeed understand what you are hearing even with a strange system in a strange room playing strange music. Stan Ricker picked out one part from among hundreds in a system he had never heard before in a room he'd never been with music he didn't know.

Think what you like people. If you want to side with the folks who can't hear and aren't interested in learning, be my guest. But I will tell you, contrary to popular opinion, this is not a zero sum game. Improve one, improve all. If only they be willing.