Elk said…
As far as the system which one remembers sounded clear, transparent and amazing thirty years ago now seeming dull
…
I just guess the reason we change to more clear, revealing, transparent setups is not that we compensate hearing losses, but that our setups improved in a way that they can still sound pleasant although they can reveal much more clarity.
jazznut saidNot at all, loosing one's hearing still sucks - and (unlike eye glasses) hearing aids often do little to help in many situations because all they do (at least the older ones) is change the frequency response which isn't really addressing the majority of issues that may be involved.Two things I’d still wonder about:
Does this really mean such frequency dependent hearing losses have no negative effect in perception? As if no hearing loss was present?
Still, a flute sounds the same to me now as it did years ago, the same with a piano. That’s most likely because most of perception consists of looking for (and analyzing) differences from the expected (or the aggregate of past experience). Both new and old listening experiences consist of storing the differences from other experience. When the sets of differences are differenced there’s less change than you might expect. (The storing of differences is sometimes embarrassing: if you get married again you soon discover that many things are associate with “wife” not with a particular person and it’s common for the old name to pop out accidentally until “wife” comes to mean the new wife.)
jazznut said And can you be sure that what you interpret as "cymbals sound the same to you then and now" is objectively true and that your brain doesn't fool you (or me in such a case) in another way?There is no objectively true when talking about perception - shared optical illusions show that we perceive things the same even if what we all perceive is "wrong." Is what I see as blue the same as what you see as blue? Does it matter to my perception of blue that my left eye sees a slightly redder version of the world than my right? Does it matter that I wear photo-grey all of the time which does a subtle color shift? The answer is that if I say blue when you say blue we are both seeing blue no matter what signals our eyes are actually producing.
There are so many “could it be’s”. Could it be that many younger people like brighter speakers because they have damaged their hearing by listening to music too loud and need to compensate for the damage? Could it be that some older people like brighter speakers to compensate for ageing hearing loss? Could it be that my memory of my loudspeakers being brighter 19 years ago is because my hearing indeed has changed due to ageing? Could it be that I am imagining the whole thing? Could it be that some people with hearing losses do not like brighter speakers because they have developed other hearing accommodations similar to those Ted has talked about and either have or have not a taste for brighter speakers? Could it be that peoples’ ears genetically vary in structure, giving people different perceptions and preferences of what sounds good? Could it be that there are genetic differences in the brain mechanisms that interpret and process audio nerve signals? Could it be that some listeners get high on drugs and that any speaker sounds wonderful to them? Could it be any, all or none of the above?
Could be 
Ted, there are examples of optical illusions where some people perceive one thing in an image and others perceive something else.
There are many examples of these. You are correct that people’s prior experiences can influence their perceptions. Since people’s experiences vary, their perceptions will vary.
Well, Joe, to be fair - you started it with the “could be’s”…
You could be right about that.
Ted,
I like and understand your explanations!
They just still don’t fully close my case as….
…a piano and flute can still be recognized and sound so I clearly recognize them in perception if they actually lack a small frequency range for me
…storing/recognizing differences to the original instrument from memory could be quite vague. Not sure if I have the correct perception in mind of my hifi setup from 1990, or a violin sound from a concert 6 months ago in terms of their level in the 2k range, although I’m pretty sure
…blue=blue: We certainly always can tell a piano from a flute or recognize a piano correctly, hearing loss yes or no. Even strong frequency dips can’t prevent this.
For me the theory “recognize differences from the expected (original instrument or previous hifi experiences)” does not serve the problem “do I have the same absolute perception of a one time event of a certain frequency area level with/without hearing loss”
I never questioned that even someone who’s half deaf still recognizes a piano or flute or that he maybe remembers them as always having sounded like now or like the real instrument.
jazznut said For me the theory “recognize differences from the expected (original instrument or previous hifi experiences)” does not serve the problem “do I have the same absolute perception of a one time event of a certain frequency area level with/without hearing loss”The point is that there is no absolute perception - we don't perceive the same thing twice because each time we perceive something we fold some of the new differences into the older model(s) of what we are perceiving.
It perfectly conceivable that everything about a particular experience is lost (me not hearing crickets in one ear), but almost anything we perceive has many facets (and often comes in thru multiple senses.) The ear/brain is set up to find coincidences, use them to find similarities with the aggregate(s) of past experience(s) and analyze (and usually store) the new differences/update the found prototypes. If some part of the experience is missing it’s filled in from past experience and is just as real in the now as it was the other times it was experienced. ANYTHING we perceive has a huge amount of missing pieces that are filled in by expectations - check out “inattentional blindness” - do you really thing we see everything we’re looking at? We only see what we are paying attention to and the brain fills in the rest with expectations. (There’s a lower level “subroutine” looking for differences from expectations that might be important, but unless it’s important it doesn’t bubble up to consciousness.) When we listen we pick what we want to pay attention to (or our mood picks it 
) and we don’t perceive things that are too expected and in many cases don’t notice any “holes”.
Some migraines sort of high light this: the brain many not notice differences where were aren’t paying attention and hence we may be surprised by a car coming from nowhere or a person stepping off of a sidewalk. We don’t perceive a the holes because the brain was saying “yah, that’s OK and unchanging”. When I feel a migraine coming on I get off the road other wise I’m a danger to others and I have multiple paint splotches on my bumpers from not noticing how close to a building I was while parking or backing out.
Ted Smith saidOk, if this works, you got me...... If some part of the experience is missing it's filled in from past experience and is just as real in the now as it was the other times it was experienced.
Still a bit curious how this matches with the fact that my mother can hardly hear (and recognize) me on one ear at the phone, but this explanation makes some sense 
Yeh, not hearing well is a pain and does cause problems especially with too much missing info (but maybe not the problems one might expect.) But some missing info is perfectly normal and a part of everyone’s everyday lives. When the brain has to work to hard to do the processing mentioned above we get tired more easily as we expend more energy to perceive the same thing - but that doesn’t mean that we can’t perceive the same things, just maybe not.
BTW that’s one of the reasons I question the MQA algorithms. Bob always mentions that the bandwidth between the ear and the brain is only 1Mbit (or something like that, it doesn’t matter) to justify lossy processing. But since each time we listen we are listening for different things and the brain can control the mechanics of the inner and middle ear (and how our head is pointed…) we aren’t necessarily listening to the same 1Mbit each time and more obviously different people are listening with their experiences (and their different ears) and use yet other, perhaps not entirely overlapping, 1Mbit streams… How would an algo pick the correct 1Mbit (or 2 or 3) to have fidelity and have that choice be universal correct?
I want to clarify that the kind of ageing hearing loss that I’ve experienced to date only subtly affects my perception of music. As with most men over 60 who have not abused their ears, I have lost hearing above around 8kHz to 10kHz, depending on dB level. There is still plenty of audible range left to hear beautiful music. And as you know, out-of-range frequencies can still interact with in-range frequencies to enrich and give realism to the audible music. A good example is pipe organ music. Mixture stops may contain some pipes that sound out-of-range, but when mixed with in-range pipes they change the character of those note sounds dramatically. Same thing with harmonics. Out-of-range harmonics combine with in-range sound waves to color and develop the sound.
Interesting side note: At Exeter Cathedral in England I put my face right next to the mouth of a sounding 32’ tall (16Hz pitch) organ pedal bass pipe and could only hear a mild 16’ overtone and a gentle breeze of air, but I felt the powerful 32’ pitch wave oscillating through my body. Moreover, no matter where I stood in that huge cathedral, I felt the sound pressure wave with virtually the same intensity. The 16Hz wavelength is quite long.
No that is not me in the photo; but I did take the photo.
If you haven’t guessed yet, I’m a pipe organ freak. I’m building a 9’ tall, 24" diameter, 18" LF driver ported subwoofer tuned to 16Hz for my home digital pipe organ. My organ has 64 digital ranks and two ranks of real playing pipes.The sounds of the digital pipes are indistinguishable from the real pipes. The technology is that good.
It is worth keeping in mind that 10kHz to 20kHz is only an octave and is extremely high in pitch. The top note of a piccolo is only 4kHz. The harmonics of many instruments fall below 10kHz. There is very little acoustic energy between 10kHz and 20kHz. In fact you can truncate all frequencies above 10kHz in an excellent recording and few will ever know. The recording still sounds superb.
Also, meaningful sum tones and differences tones are relatively low in pitch. While theoretically there can be difference tones created by the interplay of harmonics of certain instruments - such as a cymbal and a trumpet with a straight mute (a couple of the relatively few instruments with harmonics which extend beyond 12.5kHz) - those harmonics high enough to result in a difference tone between 10kHz and 20kHz possess so little energy the difference tone will be inaudible.
Elk, excellent point. I noticed this also in the generalized musical instrument chart in Post #16.
JosephLG saidIf you haven’t guessed yet, I’m a pipe organ freak. I’m building a 9’ tall, 24" diameter, 18" LF driver ported subwoofer tuned to 16Hz for my home digital pipe organ. My organ has 64 digital ranks and two ranks of real playing pipes.The sounds of the digital pipes are indistinguishable from the real pipes. The technology is that good.
Now that is the coolest thing I have seen on this forum in a long, long time. This is truly amazing and I had no idea such a thing existed. Thanks for sharing.
Ted Smith saidOne more thought:… If some part of the experience is missing it’s filled in from past experience and is just as real in the now as it was the other times it was experienced.
If I’m correct this means, someone with hearing loss who never heard a cymbal in his life and now hears one isn’t able to compensate (and therefore hears it “false” due to his loss), while such a person who heard a cymbal before is able to compensate?
Ted Smith saidIt’s not a coincidence that I have JM Lab speakers and not Watt/Puppy, Alexandria or similar. You can just look at the speakers and see the differences in design that affect soundstage, coherence, attention to delivering what’s presented to them. (I do know plenty of people that really like the Watt/Puppy, Alexandria and similar speakers - they just aren’t to my taste.)
jazznut saidWe're getting more speculative here, but in so far as one has never heard something like a cymbal (metal things being struck) that part of the experience will be missing (but not missed). But to not be able to tell if tonality/FR is near correct he'd need to never have heard anything in some frequency band (or something like that.) Remember, when judging for any particular feature, all of us have to use music that exposes that feature on a "nominal" system. i.e. we all have particular cuts that we've heard before to judge, say, bass, micro detail, dynamics, etc. It's no different for someone with different hearing.Ted Smith said If some part of the experience is missing it's filled in from past experience and is just as real in the now as it was the other times it was experienced.One more thought:If I’m correct this means, someone with hearing loss who never heard a cymbal in his life and now hears one isn’t able to compensate (and therefore hears it “false” due to his loss), while such a person who heard a cymbal before is able to compensate?
I should note that all of this discussion is academic at least in the sense that it may bear little resemblance to what one might prefer. Still I don’t prefer a tipped up system tho I’d prefer less high frequency hearing loss.
Ted Smith said Still I don't prefer a tipped up system tho I'd prefer less high frequency hearing loss.Amen