Not so trivial trivia..

I always laugh when I see 60 year old reviewers write about how good their hearing is above 15khz. Not only are they most likely lying, but they aren't saying a word about the 1 to 5khz area, which is by far the most critical range for someone who actually does reviewing for a living. I sometimes wonder if the KEF LS50 was given a "class A" rating because the waveguide bump in that area makes the old reviewers feel more like young reviewers again
 
I'm just glad I can still discriminate between left and right, what's in front of me and what's behind. Plus the sound of someone playing a drum kit in their home, versus the sound of loud amplifiers / speakers.

Like many, I was in a band when it was already 20 years too late to do that, circa 1984. One of the best innovations I came up with - without telling our landlord - was to place a window in the dividing wall of the basement - and put the drummer behind it. Then practice listening to the board mix using over-ear headphones, individually volume controlled. What a relief!!

As a bass player, you can only take so many cymbal crashes standing within a 6ft radius of a drum kit. One drummer we played with shattered my antique China cymbal...

When I worked at Amazon, we were expected to hear 2-way radio communications over the fulfillment center factory background noise. I was known as "headphone-guy", as I used noise cancelling headphones which I had the radio piped into. Anything to further save what was left of my hearing from constant conveyance machine noise!
 
Last edited:
On a different "note", there are different levels of amusia in the population. On one end is pure tone deafness, which affects about 4% of the population, and at the other extreme are those with perfect pitch, which accounts for probably much less than even that. In between lie different gradations amongst the population within those two extremes. I believe that most guys in this hobby are closer to the "perfect pitch" end of the spectrum, and that it is, for the most part, independent of clinical auditory hearing loss. In other words, typical "auditory hearing loss" won't have too much of an effect on our enjoyment of music into old age, as long as we keep our keen awareness of pitch. Oh, and yes, as long as we turn the volume up a little bit;-)
 
Last edited: