Older people hear music better and there is hope for high-end audio as the earbud-wearing, cheap-headphone-toting kids grow older and start to hear more and more nuances and finer details of the music they are listening to

Some think we heard better when we were younger.

I used to think YES. This is exactly right.

That music sounded glorious in our teens because we could hear harmonics better. So even inferior stereo systems sounded Grrreat. [Boy, did they!]

That we spend our later years having to build systems with more and more resolution and harmonic content because we have a hard time getting the musical content past our aged ears and hardened listening centers and into our poor overworked tired brains

But now I really wonder if this is Bull Hockey.

That the young have unformed, lazy, uneducated ears. That they could hardly benefit from high res and rich harmonic content because their young ears and brains just cannot process it.

Of course, some people’s ears never grow up. They remain lazy and dull in their admittedly extra-curricular job as fine listening instruments.

But this explains why we have all these iPod, earbud-listening kids. This just sound grrreat to them. But later, as they get older, their ears will begin to develop and they will want a more refined listening experience.

This bodes well for the high-end audio business in the next couple of decades.

I came around to this point of view because sometimes I notice my ears becoming VERY sensitive. The sound of my [long] hair moving across my face was loud and annoying me. WTF?

I have come to realize that my hearing is often incredibly sensitive, especially in the early morning or late at night.

Often painfully so.

Well. Not painfully. Supremely annoyingly so, anyway, in the wrong environment.

So, it is not that screaming kids irritate adults because the kids are all that loud. It is that adults have more and more sensitive hearing as they age.

Sure we lose a few Hz at the top frequencies as we grow old, but the overall effect is one that allows us to hear the most fantastic nuances in music, voice, and in the sounds of the world all around us.

Cool huh? 🙂

The subwoofer has an interesting role in high-end audio.

I’ve been thinking about these beast ever since we started our new high-end audio subwoofers page in the Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy

It is both loathed and reviled and cheered and loved with abandon.

PRO

1. If your system is not flat to 20 Hz, then your system sucks. It is just for leettle boys.

[Of course, at 100 dB, a subwoofer flat to 20 Hz… oh, excuse me, it says 15 Hz on the spec sheet, would have to be registered as a weapon of mass destruction. It would be hard to walk across the floor of most homes but at least the mice would finally give up and go live somewhere else :-).]

2. Subwoofers are cool and should indeed be registered as WMD

3. It is too expensive to buy a full-range speaker that goes this low

CON

1. The crossover in your subwoofer is necessarily not as deft as that in your much-more-expensive speakers, and in any case it is different, so the overall sonic quality of your playback suffers.

2. Most real music does not go down to 20 Hz. In fact most modern music is heard through JBL-like speaker systems and the satisfying bass we hear on those systems is way above 20Hz.

3. Subwoofers take up space

Most people buy subs for home theater, pairing them with small speakers that only go down to 100Hz or so. They NEED to use subs to get any bass at all. I’ve heard Magnepan systems designed like this that were excellent – small Magnepan wall-hanging speakers and a REL sub.

Us? We’ll stick with full-range speakers that go down MOSTLY to 20… uh…. 25… uh … Hz. It works for us at this time.

Subs are just not a necessity for us.

However, having heard the Acapella ION Plasma tweeter again here for almost a year now – I think super tweeters might indeed be a necessity. 🙂

[Having a hard time convincing Neli of this… but there is just so much more Presence and Life when the high frequencies are fully fleshed out…  Then again there are the same pesky CONs #1 and #3]

In the end, it is this argument [and not the “You ain’t no manly man without a sub” argument :-)]:

How can it be “high fidelity” if your system can’t reproduce all of the frequencies?

I confess. We don’t use a subwoofer. And this question annoys me.