Expert Pro 440 vs. 1000

[Delija]

I'm "only" 39 , so the time when I'll need some "treble boost" is coming very fast...

[damonhayhow]

The choice of B&W D3 speaks a lot about your sound preference. No matter what the amplification and source are, D3 is just too bright and fatiguing for my ears.
Yes, there are details and there are dynamics, but after half an hour I'm tired of listening

Obviously, people have different expectations from the system - that's why there are so many different system configurations.

DeliI do not have B&W D3s. I have Wilson Benesch Resolutions which I was describing as NOT being as bright as B&W D3s. Like you, I find the D3's way too bright and fatiguing.

[David A]

Your ears must be good as at my age I need all the detail I can get. I suppose the road to audio nirvana is different for different folks. My own has been defined by absolute clarity after the days of AM radio, record decks with needles like nails and mono only recordings.

I'm "only" 39 , so the time when I'll need some "treble boost" is coming very fast...

Audiophiles tend to have a rather optimistic view of what we can hear, simply because we keep seeing a range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz quoted. Those 2 frequencies are the absolute limits, if you like, for people with "perfect" hearing and things like age and various forms of hearing damage mean that, in real life, the range we can hear is going to be less than that, often considerably less than that. Here's a link to a quote from a neuroscience text book which states that the upper range for "average adults" is "often closer to 15-17 kHz" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10924/

I've seen mention somewhere, I can't quickly locate it, that age related deterioration starts somewhere around 20 years of age so if you'e 20 years old the odds are that you probably cannot hear a 20 kHz tone, you probably need to be younger with really good ears to hear 20 kHz. From 20 onwards, we're all on the downward slope.

Since what we're interested in is listening to music, some other facts are relevant:

- the highest fundamental note produced by a musical instrument is somewhere between 7 and 8 kHz. Musical instruments do produce sounds at higher frequencies but those sounds are overtones of the fundamental so as long as you can hear up to 8 kHz you can hear every note contained in music. What you miss out on above that as your hearing deteriorates with age are the overtones. The first overtone occurs one octave above the fundamental which is twice the frequency of the fundamental. If the average adult has an upper limit of 15-17 kHz, that means roughly half of the adults in the world can't hear a frequency equal to the first overtone of the highest note produced by a musical instrument.

- high frequencies are easily absorbed by things like cloth. Test measurements show that speaker grille cloth reduces a speaker's frequency output at high frequencies, there are losses due to absorption by soft furnishings in the room and losses also occur every time the sound is reflected by a room surface. The level of all sound also reduces with distance and air itself actually absorbs sound at high frequencies so you can look at those nice frequency response plots for a speaker and think that's what you're hearing but those measurements were taken at a given distance and if you're sitting further away than that distance what you actually hear is going to be rolled off from what the response plot shows and average adults can basically forget whatever the plot shows above 15-17 kHz anyway. I'm 72 and the last time I tried listening to some high frequency test tones I couldn't hear 10 kHz in a quiet room with a low level of background noise.

- if you go and get your hearing tested by an audiologist, the odds are that they aren't going to even bother measuring your hearing response above 7 to 8 kHz because higher frequencies "aren't important" to the thing they're most concerned about which is your ability to understand speech and to hear the normal sounds of everyday life, and all of the fundamental frequencies for those things occur below 7-8 kHz and there's nothing much they can do to improve your hearing above that range anyway.

So let's say you're like me and you can't hear above 10 kHz. Does that mean you need "treble boost" to really enjoy music? Actually no, and if you did start boosting the treble response of your system you'd probably find yourself thinking it was starting to sound bright? Why? Because what we hear from our systems sounds "right" or "natural" or "realistic" when it sounds the way the voices and instruments sound when we go to a live performance and when we go to a live performance we can't turn the treble up, we listen to it the way it comes from the instruments and voices. Good recordings reproduce the sound of the instruments and voices so if we turn the treble up on our systems, the sound we hear no longer sounds like what we hear at a live performance, it sounds brighter and it no longer sounds "right" or "natural" or "realistic" to us. We slowly lose our high frequency hearing as we age and we never really notice it unless we actually start being unable to hear fundamental tones when all of a sudden the music starts to be missing some of the highest notes. Actually you'd have to lose hearing above 4 kHz to miss the top octave of notes that occur in music, those notes are only produced by a very few instruments and they also occur only rarely in music and if the music you listen to doesn't contain any of those notes, and a lot of music doesn't contain any of those notes, you might never even notice the fact that you could no longer hear those highest notes in music but you might start to notice that voices and instruments didn't sound quite as sweet because you'd be missing some of the overtones that contribute to the tonal characteristics of the sound but turning the treble up probably isn't going to make those overtones more audible to you anyway.

If you want to worry about hearing loss, then start worrying about noise related hearing loss. People tend to think that what they're going to lose if they listen to too much loud music or loud noise is their hearing at the high and low ends of our hearing range. That's wrong. Our ears are most sensitive in the range from 1 to 6 kHz and increasingly less sensitive as frequency drops below 1 kHz or rises above 6 kHz. Where the damage from loud sounds occurs is in the range where our ears are most sensitive so where noise related hearing damage first becomes noticeable is in that 1 to 6 kHz range and where people start to notice it first is when they start having difficulty understanding speech. As it becomes worse, the damage starts to spread to higher and lower frequencies so you'll actually retain hearing in those ranges longer but most of the music and voice sounds fall in the frequencies where noise related damage starts to occur first. That's where audiologists can help, and why they don't measure your hearing above 6-7 kHz.

Audiophiles who are older than their mid 20s who think they can hear 20 kHz are probably engaging in wishful thinking because most adults probably can't hear all that much above 15 kHz.

[Gerronwithit]

For an old ‘un my ears are not bad at all. To be honest, I have little interest in what level of kHz my ears can attain and am highly unlikely to bolt on power cleansers or even more exotic cables to my system, I originally bought the Devialet to allow me to have AV and HiiFi without masses of boxes and wires. I had heard the Devialet and was blown away with its sound so with its configurability it ticked the right boxes at the right time. Without any hope of getting technical the 1000 cleansed and extended the sound I could get within my own available kHz range. Other ears may vary significantly.

[Delija]

The choice of B&W D3 speaks a lot about your sound preference. No matter what the amplification and source are, D3 is just too bright and fatiguing for my ears.
Yes, there are details and there are dynamics, but after half an hour I'm tired of listening

Obviously, people have different expectations from the system - that's why there are so many different system configurations.

DeliI do not have B&W D3s. I have Wilson Benesch Resolutions which I was describing as NOT being as bright as B&W D3s. Like you, I find the D3's way too bright and fatiguing.

It's pretty obvious - my post wasn't ment for you.

[David A]

For an old ‘un my ears are not bad at all. To be honest, I have little interest in what level of kHz my ears can attain and am highly unlikely to bolt on power cleansers or even more exotic cables to my system, I originally bought the Devialet to allow me to have AV and HiiFi without masses of boxes and wires. I had heard the Devialet and was blown away with its sound so with its configurability it ticked the right boxes at the right time. Without any hope of getting technical the 1000 cleansed and extended the sound I could get within my own available kHz range. Other ears may vary significantly.

I'm largely with you. The last time I had my ears tested some years ago my hearing was pretty good for someone my age but of course the tests didn't go above 7-8 kHz anyway. Importantly I had little loss in the midrange which is where noise related damage shows up as I said, and I don't listen at loud levels.

Basically we work with the ears we have and one thing I have found over the years is that I've become a better listener. A lot of what we notice, or what we miss, comes down to paying attention or not paying attention and in some ways I notice more in the music I listen to these days than I did years ago. Age may take slowly away our high frequency range but experience and a better ability to pay attention to what we're hearing can come with age. The news isn't all bad. The glass may be half empty, but the half full that's left is some pretty good stuff that can improve as it ages if we take good care of it.