As a young person with healthy, maybe above average hearing acuity I would encounter older folks with declining acuity and thought that whatever their hearing filter was, they perceived live music through it and reproduced music through it too, so why would their judgement of what speaker was better at recreating that sound differ from mine? I neglected to consider their accumulated lifetime memory of how things sounded to them. I also didn’t realize hearing loss can be asymmetrical and can include the presence of high levels of masking noise, not just the roll off of higher frequencies. Unfortunately I now know these to be true!
Whether to do anything about the limitations of our ears
In the thread 'How do you listen?' appears the following:
"We do not hear all frequencies equally well at all volume levels. Low bass and high treble in particular need to be at a fairly high level to be heard at all."
This asks a big question:
Should we listen as our ears hear, with their inability to apprehend all audio band frequencies at the same intensity? As we are of course compelled to do when listening to live music.
Or when listening to recorded music should we adjust the intensity of particular frequencies we don't hear so well? This will of course give a different presentation from what we hear live.
Or, to put it a different way, should audio manufacturers design equipment to present the frequency range as flat as a microphone perceives it, or as our ears perceive it?
But a microphone is just another flawed ear, with its own imperfections as regards intensity across the audio frequency range (and others of course).
Or, again: a flat response can be flat only as the means of listening presents it.
"We do not hear all frequencies equally well at all volume levels. Low bass and high treble in particular need to be at a fairly high level to be heard at all."
This asks a big question:
Should we listen as our ears hear, with their inability to apprehend all audio band frequencies at the same intensity? As we are of course compelled to do when listening to live music.
Or when listening to recorded music should we adjust the intensity of particular frequencies we don't hear so well? This will of course give a different presentation from what we hear live.
Or, to put it a different way, should audio manufacturers design equipment to present the frequency range as flat as a microphone perceives it, or as our ears perceive it?
But a microphone is just another flawed ear, with its own imperfections as regards intensity across the audio frequency range (and others of course).
Or, again: a flat response can be flat only as the means of listening presents it.