@Floyd Toole I hope the direct question below is appropriate, but I was fascinated to learn in another thread that you had stopped participating as an listener in loudspeaker DBT tests some time after turning 60, feeling that your hearing acuity was no longer sufficient and that it's "a young/normal person's hearing game."
One common criticism of gear reviewers, professional and otherwise, that I often see is that since many are older, their senior citizen hearing and the loss of the ability to perceive high frequencies is a problem for their credibility, or even a disqualifying handicap. Your self-exile from participation as an expert listener challenged my own feeling that such criticisms tend to be quite aggressively ageist, in a "show me your audiogram papers, please" kind of way.
Setting aside issues of subjective fallacies and golden-ears hubris, what are your thoughts on the question of how we should fairly judge the qualifications and credibility of older listeners, commentators, and reviewers (or people with compromised hearing in general) in this game of hi-fi evaluation and credibility using both measurements and listening skills?
I comment on this in the 4th edition - it is an important topic, especially in this internet age, when everyone can be a critic.
My decision to stop participating in the double-blind listening tests was based on my feeling that it was becoming more difficult - perhaps aided by the fact that loudspeakers being evaluated were getting better and more similar sounding. But also, because the computer generated statistics on my subjective ratings indicated that I was becoming less reliable - the ratings showed increased variability. None of this was surprising, as we had learned many years earlier that this is the result of hearing loss, and my hearing was not getting any better. It is important to know that the listening tests I was participating in were multiple-loudspeaker (3 or 4 at a time) monophonic comparison tests, the purpose of which was to identify resonant colorations and other timbral defects. The almost universal result of such tests is a preference for timbrally neutral, i.e. flat frequency response (on-axis) loudspeakers. As discussed a few times in these forums, the recordings are simply test signals to stimulate and reveal problems. With increasing hearing loss it becomes more difficult to recognize these problems, even when this is the only task at hand.
Reviewing loudspeakers is a
very different task. They are usually "sighted", which casts doubt on the entire process. They are almost always done in stereo, which adds to the difficulty in hearing timbral problems in loudspeakers. Of course, one listens to a wide variety of music, not all of which is good at revealing the problems. Being entertained/impressed/stimulated, etc. become factors adding color to the commentary. All the upstream studio manipulations in the recordings are difficult to separate from the characteristics of the loudspeakers. Small room resonances add complications that are almost never measured or corrected for and they add substantial uncertainty to what is heard - bass alone accounts for about 30% of overall sound quality perceptions. Such reviews are arguably as much record reviews as they are loudspeaker reviews. Only if the reviewer has access to, understands and respects, comprehensive anechoic data on the loudspeaker is it possible to intelligently comment on what is causing the final perceptions. Decades of Stereophile reviews are evidence of the "two cultures" in audio, when some subjective reviewers find merit in loudspeakers that John Atkinson's measurements show are seriously flawed. All this is true for listeners with or without hearing loss. Hearing loss simply adds to the uncertainties of what the reported perceptions actually mean.
If all this is true for loudspeakers that are measurably different, how does one think it applies to electronics and wires which are measurably identical or only subtly different? There is a great deal of fiction in reviews. Fiction can be entertaining, but not informative.
Simple loss of high frequencies is an obvious problem in criticizing sound quality - if it cannot be heard it cannot be commented on. But there is much more. Lost broadband hearing loss, a common defect, means that subtleties at all frequencies are not heard. Then there are the changes in critical bandwidths that occur with age and hearing loss, meaning that how the music itself is perceived changes. Binaural hearing also degrades, meaning that how a listener combines direct and reflected sounds in the room - the soundstage and imaging - also change. Anyone - myself included now - who experiences greater difficulty conversing in restaurants or pubs has already become perceptually handicapped.
None of this means that one no longer derives pleasure from music and movies. It just means that our opinions are our own, not for generalization and debate. I reported my hearing performance in my books up to age 60, and I was performing better than the statistical average. I recently had another evaluation, at age 87, and was told that my hearing was "normal" . Absolute rubbish! But as I keep repeating, audiologists are only concerned about speech intelligibility not the sound quality of the speech, much less hi-fi hearing. A hearing threshold test is equivalent to kicking the tires of a car and assessing its handling performance.
