Guess I'm blessed with very good hearing at 63. & I was a 7 night a week pro rock guitarist for a number of years.
I can't comment on the Laserdisc releases but I think the DVD versions all were, yes. In addition to that, the video soundtrack master was at least one generation away from Clearmountain's original stereo mix reels; Staff's remaster is taken directly from those. I discussed this a bit more upthread
NOBODY has very good hearing at 63. Unless you are superhuman. When was the last time you had your hearing tested by a professional? Do you have the hearing of a 63 year old or a 23 year old? I'd bet my last quid it's the former.
I'm sure I've lost the very top end (over 12 k?). My midrange is excellent. My one genetic gift from my mother.
It’s a shame we all have to get old but it’s a fact of life. I don’t think it’s a good policy to worry about what you may have lost. You know when you enjoy what you’re hearing. That should be all that matters.
the vast majority of people over the age of 18 have lost the range above 15 kHz. It's normal once you hit your thirties for the range above 8K kHz to start to go. It's not that the range goes away instantly, it starts to fade so the high frequency noises lose their apparent power until they are inaudible. http://ee_ce_img.s3.amazonaws.com/c.../article-figures/4039/article-g04_400_256.jpg https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/docs/documents/1474/men-shift-threshold-age-db.png I could just about (very faintly) hear those mosquito nuisance noise emitters to get rid of lounging teenagers when I was in my early 30s. No chance now. I have to get my hearing tested every year for work; every year it is worse than the year before (but "normal" for my age). Thing is, it is so gradual you don't notice it. It's not like eyesight where it is obvious - needing a bright light to read a newspaper, or holding the paper at arms length etc. Everyday noises are low frequency, so it's not until the very low frequencies go - in your 70s - that you realise you are mutton. I suppose it's a boon to high end hifi sellers. They can sell snake oil audio equipment to middle aged men with more money than sense (of hearing). And the same middle aged men can pretend their senses are as virile as they were in their 20s.
I had the laserdisc 30 years ago and thought it sounded terrible - very wan and feeble. The 2.0 track on the 2006 DVD was pretty decent, but the CD was easily the best its sounded. Though my 1983 go-to is the other Montreal show on the gray market 10-CD "Live" package I got a few years back. Sounds great and it's the whole damned show, not the edited one!
When I first read that the CD was the best sounding version I was thinking it was the "only" version (Dolby digital and VHS can't really be counted). You are right the Laserdisc is something we can compare! I've just compared Laserdisc to CD and yes the Laserdisc is muddy and flat sounding in comparison.
I don't want to go OT, but I'm often surprised that our hearing as we age isn't mentioned in topics such as masterings and waveform examinations. For example, people will rail that everything is cut off over 20Hz, which obviously isn't great. However, at my age, can I even come close to hearing it anyway? I also think we tend to over-estimate how good our hearing actually is. It's the gradual loss that does it, and a dose of ego, I guess. For me, I need to get my hearing checked. I know I have something going on with my left ear. Also - and this is really old man territory - I'm no longer any good in crowds. That is, there is zero chance of me ever eavesdropping on someones conversation, it just sounds like mush and white noise. Of course, sat listening to music in a controlled environment, I do much better, but I can't deny that, like everyone else, my equipment is far more resolving than my ears (sadly).
The Montreal second night (13/7/83) is better than the filmed Vancouver show IMO. I love it. Carmine Rojas and Tony Thompson are on fire. Or maybe something else….
I always used that Sergeant Pepper tone as a benchmark. Only last year I found out I can't hear it anymore. Since I know degrading hearing runs in the family I'm sure it will get worse once. One of the reasons I hardly bother for the highest audiophile standard of my equipment.
Personal experience here (hear). Get it checked. I had a problem for 9 months during 2020, slightly muffled left ear. Not enough to get it looked at for most of the year. I still have the issue by the way, but I had hearing tests and an MRI at the beginning of this year. Something unconnected was found by chance, but you never know. Brain surgery was last month. Nothing to do with the hearing problem I’m told but I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t have had the MRI. If somethings wrong, best to get it checked buddy. However minor.
I'm confident my tinnitus easily hits the 20kHz range, probably beyond (my brain hears that). And yes, I'm over 18
Cheers for the advice. Yeah, I need to follow up. Right now getting a face-to-face appointment is impossible (and you kind of have to be in the same room as the Doctor for this). They're doing phone appointments but a little pointless. I'll follow up though!
No humans can. Which is why it is cut off there. (20 kHz - middle c is 262 Hz; 20 Hz is whale song!) As you say, it is ego : people pretend they can hear things they cannot. Where I get my hearing tested, you are put in a pitch black sound proof room so you can literally hear you heart beating. Wearing headphones, notes of random frequency are played at random intervals, and when you hear something you press a button. The random intervals is because you often hit the button because you think you heard something. I swear, my hearing is worse than I thought it was in controlled environments. There is no bullsh1t involved where you can pretend to hear things. I'll be sat there for 30 seconds, hearing nothing thinking "wtf - surely some notes have been played!". Then the nurse ends the test and says I've passed and shows me a grim graph of my results that are tailing off at high frequency. The nurse always asks me if I use power tools a lot or go to lots of loud concerts! I know for sure my hearing is damaged - I used to stand near the front at concerts, near the stack and afterwards I would be - literally - deaf or mushy in one ear for several hours afterwards. That's damage done and its irreparable.
deaf people can have tinnitus. It's caused by damaged auditory cells. Tinnitus is in the brain, not the ear. (sure all sounds are in the brain, but the ear is sensitive to air pressure and converts a change in pressure to a change in an electrical signal that the brain interprets as sound. The ear's sensitivity to a change in air pressure and certain pressures, decreases with damage and age. That's hearing loss. But you can still have tinnitus at frequencies above which you ears can detect, because the noise is internal - generated exclusively by the brain - not external generated by air pressure.) I have tinnitus too. My fault - totally self-inflicted. It's not bad, it doesn't affect me during the day - but it is noticeable on quiet nights. I'll end up having to play the sounds of whale song or crashing waves to sleep as I get older! I know some people who have it so bad and it drives them to the edge of insanity.
I'm 51 and in the same boat as you. I struggle to follow a conversation if there is other noise in the area. When the dishwasher and the washer are running at the same time I have to turn on the soundbar on my TV to listen. I enjoy the conversation's on the forum over audio quality but I'm very much forced to take the poster's word for it as I cannot pick up on it. I mentioned it to my doctor and her response was "it happens and there's nothing we can do." All that being said, I still think Tonight and Never Let Me Down sound horrible .
you can go to places like SpecSavers to get a hearing test. That's probably what the doctor would tell you to do anyway (in the first instance).
That’s what happened to me. Practice nurse did a visual inspection before Xmas and referred me to Specsavers for a hearing test and then an ENT consultant from there as no visible issues. I feel so fortunate it led to discovering the tumour and from being told about it (March) to removal in June it was such a smooth process. Walked out of hospital 48 hours after surgery.
I was new to LD when I got "Serious Moonlight" in 1991 and really excited to finally hear it sound good. 30 years later, I remain disappointed at how awful it sounded!
The "Serious Moonlight" video was my gateway to Bowie. I actually saw him live in 1983 but the show didn't really stick. I liked it but I didn't know many of the songs, as I kinda went "to go" since it was a Big Deal, and that meant I didn't enjoy the concert as much as if I was more familiar with his work. The 1983 concert didn't inspire me to dig into Bowie's catalog, but in 1984, I rented the video and loved it. That's what pushed me to go buy actual Bowie albums and I became a huge fan before too long! So whether or not the performances on the video are not as good as others, they remain near and dear!
While this is useful information, something I've noticed in my own explorations of CD quality vs. hi-res audio is that the difference at higher fidelities is usually the difference between a vivid picture and a very engrossing simulation. What I mean is that hi-res very seldom provides new musical information as much as the veil lifts and I'm often feeling like I'm listening to sounds being created in real time in the room with me (by instruments and players, not speakers). Obviously, this is null and void if the entire recording was made "in the box" and no acoustic space was employed, but it strikes me that the frequency response, hearing, etc. play on each other in a more subtle way than the bits and bytes crowd would have us believe. Having taken some intro level audio engineering classes, production really is a smoke and mirrors game where frequencies from one track reinforce frequencies that were EQed out of another one so they didn't stomp on each other in the mix. Basically, our ears are being fooled into thinking each constituent part sounds fuller than it actually does if you were to solo it out of the mix without any compensation. That's why even "elements" mixes aren't just soloed tracks from the original mix. They're new mixes in their own right. That's a long preamble, but my point is that I wonder if those "unheard" frequencies can affect how we perceive the ones we CAN hear, which would certainly explain (if we're assuming it's not all placebo here) why a decent sized crew of people "hear the difference." Obviously, mastering and source play in heavily here and you can't make a silk purse out of a compressed sow's ear, but it's worth considering.
We're talking about vibrations in air being perceived by meat suits that essentially adapted hearing for animalistic purposes. I'm going to hazard a guess there are mechanisms in that meat suit not yet properly explained or explored because, if we're honest, the application for figuring them out is esoteric at best. We know, for example, that perception of color has a great deal to do with other wavelengths of light coming from nearby objects and can involve what boils down to illusion. Why would the aural experience be any different? Honestly, it's not something I care to have an argument over. This crap gets into orthodoxy territory and I don't have patience for it. I was just spit-balling and the notion is interesting, but I don't have any investment in it. If it's heresy round these parts, that's on someone else to get worked up over it.
