MQA - A clever stealth DRM - Trojan

[firedog]

On 12/31/2017 at 7:22 PM, NOMBEDES said:

Human hearing, like most aspects of human capabilities can be plotted on a bell curve.

My hearing ability is on the lower left side of of bell curve.  My wife's hearing is plotted on the higher end of the scale, where the bat and human intersect. (sorry dear, I am not saying you are an old bat).... anyway.

 

So for me, high resolution is a myth.  I can not tell the difference between a CD and a high end super duper file.  So be it.

 

Now when we interpose human hearing capabilities over a graph of age progression as it applies to hearing and disposable income you will see an X plot graph,  income will increase with age as hearing ability declines.  (the point being that the people with sufficient disposable income to enjoy expensive high resolution downloads, MQA enhanced equipment and associated components and speakers have, in general, degraded hearing acuity) 

 

There are, of course exceptions, many people on this site claim to have excellent hearing well into advanced age.  I doubt if this minority can support the house of cards that MQA is building.

 

 

 

 

 

The physical ability to hear high frequencies has little to do with the listening skills inolved in judging audio reproduction performance. 

I don’t have the ability to hear many high frequencies anymore, but I can hear all sorts of things (including in the treble region) that my younger friends with so called “better hearing” cannot. 

It’s not an issue of what frequencies can be heard on a hearing chart. Listening is a learned skill which involves training your brain to actually hear/interpret what gets to your ears. Many people with “good hearing” don’t know how to listen and “can’t hear” things that I can. So good equipment is wasted on them and not on me.

 

I’m not exceptional in this regard. 

[firedog]

2 hours ago, esldude said:

Come on now be honest.  Yes there is some skill and learning that takes place with experience.  But the curve running in the other direction is loss of hearing ability.  The loss of high frequencies is the most noted.  Your filtering sharpness also widens with age meaning less ability to hear into things.  The instantaneous dynamic range drops.  Probably some others we don't know about.  Plus no matter your experience and training you can't react to what you are no longer hear. 

 

And there are bound to be some small percentage who have all the hearing abilities you do from experience (or more or actual rigorous training) and still have more of their hearing. 

 

So yes you may hear more than most, or care about it and they don't.  There is no denying with time your hearing acuity is diminished.  

We aren't arguing.

 

Of course,  lots of people are better listeners than me, including many with better retention of all their physical abilities. My point was that the importance of the ability to hear high frequencies is much exaggerated.  

 

In practice, lots of older people who are trained listeners can hear lots more of what's going on in a recording than younger people with more pure physical ability to hear.