Interesting – and reassuring – article taken from the originlive website:
“I would like to start by saying that 25 years ago, I personally knew an excellent audio reviewer by the name of Peter Turner, who was still reviewing at the age of 80!
In case you are wondering if his reviews were reliable, I can say that he would sometimes go round to a much younger friend’s house to get a second opinion. I was with him on one of these occasions and can report that his hearing was as sharp as a pin – we had little to add to his observations during this equipment audition.
A few other factual stories are worth relating before drawing a few conclusions.
On radio 2, there was a phone in discussion regarding the rights and wrongs of 20kHz sirens installed outside city centre bars, to disperse young teenagers. Most adults hear up to 18kHz and are not supposed to be affected by this, whereas the under 15s should find it deafening. The surprising thing was, that there were 40 year old women phoning in to say how painful they found these sirens. This indicates very strongly that they retain hearing at 20Khz simply because they have not exposed themselves to much noise.
One of my friends was a sniper in Iraq. At age 23, he experienced severe hearing loss from the regular firing of a rifle with its very high impulse levels of sound.
A silver medallist swimmer who was also a real audio enthusiast, related to me that his hearing had been knocked down to around 10 kHz from the constant high frequency noise of rushing water past his ears in the pool. Although he was unable to hear top end detail, he was still able to appreciate even the smallest improvement to his Hi Fi, especially in the bass as this part of his hearing was relatively unaffected.
Lastly, the star drummer at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics was deaf from birth, and simply “feels” the music from vibration.
From these stories, the following suggestions can be made:
- Hearing is the last sense to go and remains better than we may think, right up to the end of our lives.
- Loss in hearing is more related to exposure to excessive high frequency noise, than age.
- There is much that we do not know about hearing, one scientific journal was reporting that there are sensors in the eye retina, that picks up frequencies far above 20kHz”
Recent home listening sessions with David Mancuso confirm this very fact…take care of your ears and you will enjoy music in its fullest glory for most of your life.
