What's been shown is that as hearing damage increases, listeners become increasingly unreliable in their reports. I.e., less able to form a preference.
If a person can hear then the person can form a preference. If the preference changes then their preference is unstable. How quickly does the preference change? What degree of degradation is needed to create the instability? Is there an intermediate area where the preference "sticks" unless the hearing has been quite aggravated?
"Less able to form a preference" and "increasingly unreliable in their reports" are both vague to me. If you can link to a recent article that explains these things clearly (especially one that doesn't conflate presbycusis with nosocusis and sociocusis) that would be great.
With hearing damage loudness perception across many levels changes, not just sensitivity to the quietest sounds or those with the most HF content.
If that's true then, given the pervasiveness of hearing damage, a very large portion of the public will be "increasingly unreliable in their reports", "less able to form a preference"?
From what I've read that's a big overgeneralization. It is my understanding that there are different types of hearing reduction losses, including mostly the loss of high frequencies only. Perhaps it is true only for much of sociocusis-induced degradation but what about the effects of ototoxins and health factors like diabetes (nosocusis)? Some hearing degradation factors are due to things other than the hairs being damaged. It seems very unlikely that they would all yield the same symptoms.
The area most likely to be damaged is also much lower: around 3kHz.
So, a person who can hear up to 15.5K and no further, as an example, could have reduced sensitivity at 3K? Must they have it?
If the sensitivity loss is centered around 3K that's not the same thing as "With hearing damage loudness perception across many levels changes, not just sensitivity to the quietest sounds or those with the most HF content". It would, instead, be "With hearing damage, loudness perception tends to be reduced around 3K". And, what is "tends to be"? 90% chance? 60% chance? How much of a notch filter is it versus a larger range? How deep is the reduction? What about hyperacusis?
wiki said:
Hearing loss is classified as mild, moderate, severe or profound. Pure-tone audiometry for air conduction thresholds at 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 6000 and 8000 Hz is traditionally used to classify the degree of hearing loss in each ear.
So, is the research adequately looking at the ends of the hearing range? Seems to be focusing mainly on the speech range. That would explain a finding about 3K being the most common. It would ignore any losses above 8K entirely.
It also seems relevant that a huge portion of what is written talks about hearing "loss". I prefer the term degradation, as it focuses more on quality rather than on the more binary "Can you understand speech well without a hearing aid or not?" model that seems to dominate the research (based on my very cursory/preliminary look at it, that is).
At 15kHz changes will be due to aging or chronic health issues. The results for any given person are likely more hereditary than environmental, at least that high in the spectrum.
wikipedia said:
Age affects high frequencies more than low, and men more than women. One early consequence is that even young adults may lose the ability to hear very high frequency tones above 15 or 16 kHz. Despite this, age-related hearing loss may only become noticeable later in life. The effects of age can be exacerbated by exposure to environmental noise (sociocusis). A second exacerbating factor is exposure to ototoxic drugs and chemicals/elements.
Once the loss has progressed to the 2–4 kHz range, there is increased difficulty understanding consonants.
In the Framingham cohort study, only 10% of the variability of hearing with age could be explained by age-related physiologic deterioration. Within family groups, heredity factors were dominant; across family groups, other, presumably sociocusis and nosocusis factors were dominant..
Words like "may" point to the problematic nature of tweezing out both the causes and the symptoms. For instance, if exposed to certain computer noise for long enough I get a temporary, very annoying, midrange warble that I never hear otherwise.
Wikipedia says age is weakly correlated with prebycusis and that most people had good hearing in pre-industrial times (although it also says citation needed for that latter claim). Trying to move beyond Wikipedia's mixture of accuracy and sloppiness, I just read a PDF from the NIH and it's a mess. It conflates presbycusis with nosocusis and sociocusis, for instance. It also has a lot of "sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that". Hand-waving about tinnitus. So, I looked at some other seemingly authoritative sites and they did the same thing. It's hard to persist in an investigation when the sources are shoddy.
This reminds me of the low fat diet that was the standard of the medical community for decades because a charismatic (bully) scientist contradicted the findings of a prior scientist. He mischaracterized what his "big data" showed and the prior scientist and his work became the object of ridicule and a chilling effect on follow-up research. That scientist said the data shows that sugar is the big dietary problem, not fat. I hope to be convinced, via a link to a very clear and very well-supported source of evidence that we're not dealing with a flawed understanding of the situation. Of course, before it was finally realized by the community of experts that they had gotten the low fat bit completely wrong for many years, even though the data about sugar had already been known, someone like me asking questions would have been authoritatively informed about why it's a simple fact that reducing fat intake and not worrying about sugar intake nearly as much is the way to understand diet strategy.
The data may, indeed, be out there. It may not be. It may be mischaracterized or forgotten. That's one of the issues with science. Sometimes it is the loudest voice or the voice that is saying what seems convenient or useful that wins the day. Skepticism about the low fat strategy was met, though, with ridicule and a chilling effect on research. The scientist who published a book about sugar was shunned. What about people who aren't even able to get that far, because they're shot down more quickly?
Main conclusion I reached is that speaker design should be consistent, and that any adjustments I need to make because of my hearing should be done at the source only. The speaker is a reproducer, not a loudness control or EQ.
Speakers are subject to shortcomings due to cost/benefit analysis. Designs like the LRS sacrifice bass and probably high frequency performance as well, to fit into a price point. The LRS could have come with a 'subwoofer' and a ribbon tweeter (or some other kind of high-frequency tweeter). But, it does not. For people whose high frequencies have been lost, to aging or anything else, the addition of a tweeter for better reproduction of high frequencies is probably an unnecessary added cost. The same goes for additional bass response (a complex matter due to factors like loss of bass hearing, room gain, speaker distance, etc.). (Too bad about the midrange, though, unless sophisticated EQ can solve that.)
How much quality can be sacrificed to adhere to a price point is debatable. There is also the other issue of unnecessary shoddiness of design, something that came up in another topic I was posting in recently involving USB cable noise in digital audio — something that should never be a factor as practical/affordable solutions (like placing files into RAM) are available. Persisting with a poor design paradigm is no good. If the paradigm is broken, either by simply not being able to work at all or due it having been made superfluous by a better design, then the only thing that can keep it relevant is aesthetics. (Although, a picky person will note that anything that keeps a design relevant makes the design not fundamentally broken. I think from a practical standpoint that that's too fine-grained, as snake oil can bring pleasure to people and still shouldn't be allowed.) Some have argued here that planar speakers have to be larger than the LRS for the design to be relevant-enough. Some believe that additional hardware is necessary. MartinLogan uses subwoofers for all but one model of its electrostatic planars. Magnepan uses ribbon tweeters with higher-level models. Planar bass-enhancement panels can also be purchased from Magnepan to improve bass response to a point. Both also use larger size as one goes up the chain.
Speakers involve many factors, including aesthetic considerations. It's also true that a person, even if it's purely psychological, may find more enjoyment in listening to unusual speakers than typical box speakers. Humans, as a general rule, place more value in what is unusual than what is common. That's why an otherwise beautiful flower that grows easily is called a weed and one that is very hard to cultivate is cherished. (If dandelions were very rare and difficult to grow there would be gardeners all over hoping very much to have one in their flower bed. They'd spend money on the seeds and buy the plants at Lowe's. If the blue Himalayan poppy were to grow like dandelions do people would spend money to spray toxic chemicals around their properties to prevent them from appearing.) Scarcity causing perceived value meant aluminum was once more valued than gold, as an aesthetic item! Music enjoyment is subjective as it's an artistic experience. Try as they might, no one has ever been able to define the artistic experience on a universal level. Duchamp, when he placed a urinal in an art museum, drove that point home.
That said, good design from an engineering standpoint absolutely matters, especially when it comes to snake oil like that "noise cleaner". But, there can be large differences in what people seek from any artistic experience. Some, for instance, think fiery diamonds are worth spending very large amounts of money on. Others look at them and say "Okay... pretty rocks. So what?" Some can appreciate relatively small differences in quality of diamonds but also not think they're worth spending that kind of money on, even mostly regardless of scarcity. What would one do with them? I can't tolerate jewelry and watches — too annoying to wear. Another example is McDonald's food. It is satisfying to a huge number of people but, when compared with high-quality fare, is an abysmal experience (my opinion). The context also has a strong influence on the acceptability of the design.
The biggest hope factor is for humans to be improved, with the restoration of the ability to regenerate the cochlear cells. Only mammals lost that ability so it shouldn't be too difficult to find a way to use genetics to restore it. Once that happens then, indeed, speaker preference will be almost totally universal — as hearing degradation will cease to be a factor for the overwhelming majority. Maybe we can also adjust people so they will have better taste than McDonald's and Taco Bell.
