I'd be curious to see the typical rate of hearing degradation due to age graphed against typical income growth with age that would be required to support systems of this standard. Audiophiles are synonymous with diminishing returns, but I wonder if that is even more acute with age of the listener. Super cool nonetheless.
Hearing obviously (almost always) worsens with age, but it's not a linear degradation across the entire range of hearing, like adding random static noise to an entire television image. You can often still hear many/most frequencies very well even when experiencing moderate hearing loss.
Moderate hearing loss is almost always more severe in the higher frequencies a.k.a. treble. For example I'm in my 40s, and my hearing's starting to become crap above 8khz.
Meanwhile, the fundamental frequency of most musical content is quite a bit lower in the frequency range. The highest fundamental frequency of a standard piano with standard tuning is around 4khz, and most notes are an octave or five below that; "middle C" is usually defined as 262hz.
So, still plenty to enjoy even if one's hearing is no longer pristine.
typical rate of hearing degradation due to age graphed
against typical income growth with age
This correlation is not lost on speaker manufacturers. A lot of pricey speakers add (at least) a few extra dB of treble.
None of the manufacturers will admit it, of course, but you can't convince me otherwise: I've always been certain this is an attempt to appeal to the degraded hearing capabilities of their aging+affluent customers.
