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The age factor is so real. Once you're in your 40s, there's just no point, your ears are probably the limiting factor.

The positive is that you can just embrace the convenience of 'good enough' compressed audio and wireless headphones.



When I was a kid, the whine of CRTs was genuinely annoying, and those 'keep pests away' things hurt when they went off. I was looking forward to not having to experience that as I got older.

Now that I'm middle-aged, I can tell there's a little loss around the vocal frequencies... but damn if those old tubes and pest devices aren't as annoying as ever. Ears are weird.


I had a magic skill when I was in high school: I could walk into any computer lab and tell you exactly which monitors were on (when the computer was off). I believe this is around 15K.

it looks my hearing drops off between 13k (noticeably quiet compared to 12k) to 14k (can't hear it at all).


A very old NTSC TV will be 525 scan lines @ 30 frames / second => 15,750 hz.

The source of the sound is the transformer which resets the scan line back to the original side of monitor.


Why is it more noticeable when the computer isn't sending a signal, but the monitor is on?


Hah reminded me of when I was a kid walking into the living room with a few people around many times and turning off the TV (crt of course) that was just showing a black screen. It was so loud and obvious to me. Now all the TVs seem to have bizarre screensavers


I also seem to have beyond normal hearing, and can hear some electrical devices or high pitched sounds where others don't seem to.

Last year I was in a mall where they had a Tesla store and it was emitting a horrible high pitched sound.

Where I live some houses have Seagull scaring devices and they also emit a horrible high pitched squeal which I'm guessing others can't hear, otherwise it would honestly drive you nuts.


> Last year I was in a mall where they had a Tesla store and it was emitting a horrible high pitched sound.

Some malls do that deliberately to get rid of teenagers.


Not so sure about that, mixing engineers have to do very precise manipulation of sound and there’s plenty of them working well into their 40ies and beyond. While of course aspects of your hearing deteriorate, it should still be pretty simple to pick out the artefacts of compressed audio if you’ve gotten attuned to them at a younger age… At least for heavier compression, something like a 320kbps MP3 or 256 AAC is hard to distinguish from lossless but that’s also true for young folks.


Even young audiophiles can’t pass an ABX for high quality (192kbps+) lossy compressed audio. It’s perceptually transparent.




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