The Absurdity of it All

This is THE answer (seriously):

Physical hearing parameters of a person that a machine can measure - tell you next to nothing of importance. 

It's discernment which is all. The ability to ascertain nuance that younger minds & personalities have not the intuition to perceive. It's a matter of maturity & wisdom.  If you've bothered to cultivate them you reap the fruits. Even if you haven't you usually to some degree have some extra measure of them, unavoidably.
It's not completely different (although more so in audio) from tastebuds being able to technically discern less as you age - yet if you've matured well & with some effort kept yourself perceptive & open-minded - the amount of nuance you can spot in food is far higher - even if the splashy extremes of spicy/sweet/tart, etc aren't so vivid. With your ears you don't need to concentrate to that degree, the cues are manifold & the lifetime of learning & practice amplify all the good things that more aggressively presented themselves when you were younger. Subtleties are hardly passive, inert things when you know their significance & how to let them register & trigger a depth of emotion - that was far more two-dimensional once.  You hear more of significance - not less then.

Thank you @bstbomber & @rcronk for those well reasoned thoughts.
One can't forget that in addition to our unique set of ears that they've been working in concert with our unique brain and continue to do so.

Our ears don't operate in a vacuum. Cherry picking them out of that equation and then breaking out that hoary meme of what we can't hear past a certain age ignores the rest that we can hear, or it's hoped that we overlook it and fall for it.

All the best,
Nonoise

If it sounds good to the listener, or better after experimentation, who cares how it measure or what anyone else hears? Extended listening vs. short blasts of A:B, a good discussion for a new thread perhaps. 

So I’m 51, and had my hearing tested a couple of years ago. I asked if my score was a pass for a 49 year old, and he said that my score would have been acceptable if I was eight. That said, I know I have lost some ability, and gained a little more background noise. Not horrible, but it’s there.

I was making a decision on a new piece of gear last week that I was auditioning - an EMM Labs NS1 streamer, and comparing it with my tried and true Bluesound Node 2i. I was always under the impression that the streamer really didn’t matter as long as all the bits were there. The magic really happens in the DAC, which in my case is also an EMM Labs. Much to my chagrin, I heard some very large differences between streamers both going into the same DAC. Was it a bias? Is my hearing even good enough to hear the differences?

i enlisted the help of my 14 year old freshman daughter. She loves music, but has no interest in high fi. I promised her a simple A/B off four tracks, one of which she knows very well from her iPhone and Beats. Surprisingly, she listened to A (Bluesound) and then sat up straighter when I switched to the NS1. She had no idea of what I was switching, by the way...I was able to leave everything connected and A/B with the remote. I switched the order up on track 2, left the same order for 3, and then back to the original order on track 4. I didn’t even tell her what to listen for. She picked out almost everything that I picked out in every track. The sound of actual air coming from a saxophone. The clarity in background farming parts. One guitar turning out to be three, sequenced over each other. The familiar track was Taylor Swift’s August, and she was like, I have never heard this song sound like this. So, my findings verified, I bought the NS1. My stayed in the room and listened for another two hours to so music of her choosing. (Priceless to me.)

Thank you @bstbomber & @rcronk for those well reasoned thoughts.

I approve and thanks you for the read......