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Are your speakers designed for your listening taste and hearing ability?

It occurs to me that speaker manufacturer’s and designers in many cases design their speaker ( and its subsequent sound) to the expected ’typical’ buyer. IME, a lot of high end speakers are designed to appeal to the consumer who has a certain amount of ’hearing loss’ due to age! This might sound odd, but I think that there are a lot of a’philes who have reached a certain age and have now two things going for them..1) A large enough wallet that the expense of the speaker isn’t really the issue and 2) a certain amount of high frequency hearing loss. This circumstance leads to designers and manufacturer’s bringing out speakers that are a) bright, b) inaccurate in their high frequency reproduction and c) not accurate in their reproduction across the frequency spectrum ( some may be tipped up in the highs, as an example). My impression is that a certain technology catches on--like the metal dome ( beryllium or titanium, as an example) and the manufacturer sees a certain public acceptance of this technology from the --shall we say-- less abled in the high frequency hearing dept, and the rest is as they say...history. Your thoughts?
128x128daveyf
gosta's avatar
gosta
839 posts
 
Most speakers have a significant roll-off in the treble in a normal listening room. Often starting as low as 5-6 khz. I'm not sure the speakers are necessarily the problem. The big problem, for me, is the "hot" recordings whare you try to create sharp voices in the studio that can't be listened to loud in a good system without tone controls or dsp.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
I suspect most respectable audiophiles strive to improve their room acoustics over time, maybe even continuously, so whatever speakers they happen to be using would continuously change how they sound. Not to mention the speaker locations would need to be changing continuously as room acoustics warrant, and as tweaks warrant. It’s a very dynamic situation.
delkal
110 posts
 
Its not just compensating for age. Most people will pick a speaker that has a tipped up high end when comparing 2 speakers back to back. The flat response speaker will sound muffled by comparison. At least at first. Its only after you get the bright speaker home do you find it gets fatiguing with longer listening sessions.

Same goes for speakers with a bass hump. I doubt you will be able to sell a Millennial a speaker without a 20 db boost under 150 hz.
kenjit
1,771 posts
 
custom tuning is the answer. 
mlsstl
1,405 posts
 
  One flaw in the logic of bright speakers adjusting for hearing loss is that the hearing loss is still present when listening to real sounds in the real world. That means, if a speaker's reproduction is intentionally made bright, it will no longer sound like live music. One may like a brighter sound, but it is still an artificial adjustment.

  Second, is the brain is capable of doing a marvelous job of compensating for the signal its sent by the ears. I'm in my late 60s and have hearing loss above 12K along with tinnitus, yet music sounds just as wonderful to me now as when I was much younger. I hear a lot of live acoustic music and want the sound I hear at home to match that a closely as possible. I don't need a speaker to "correct" anything for me.
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