Age and accumulated noise exposure degrade even expert listening panel reliability

Evidence

I retired from the listening panel. Figure 3.6a shows my hearing performance, which could have been worse, but the hearing threshold is a crude metric, ignoring much. Now I enjoy music and movies. I still have opinions, but they are my own. It was a bitter pill. Critical listening is a young person’s game, but then only if the young person has functioning ears. — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1802 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Hearing loss is an occupational hazard in many professions, unfortunately including professional audio. At the very least, mixers exposed to periods of very loud sound incur temporary hearing loss. Repetitions of such exposures result in permanent hearing loss. As illustrated in Section 3.2 and discussed in detail in Chapter 17, both of these seriously affect what is heard in mixes, and it is not consistent. Judgments of sound quality are impaired. Paradoxically, the people who do the mixes may not be the best judges of the results. — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1246 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Füllgrabe et al. ( 2015 ) eliminated confounding effects of hearing loss by testing young (18–27 years) and older (60–79 years) subjects with matched audiograms. Both groups had audiometric thresholds ≤ 20 dB HL from 0.125 to 6 kHz. The TFS1 test was conducted using centre frequencies of 1 and 2 kHz. The older subjects performed significantly more poorly than the young subjects for both centre frequencies. Performance on the TFS1 task was not correlated with audiometric thresholds at the test frequencies. These results confirm that increased age is associated with a poorer ability to use monaural TFS cues, in the absence of any abnormality in the audiogram. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 793 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Trained listener panels differ systematically from the general audience; Aging degrades listening judgment reliability despite accumulated expertise.; Critical listening ability declines with age even for experts — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1802 (+3 more)

Related

• Aging degrades listening judgment reliability despite accumulated expertise. (similarity 0.94)
• Critical listening ability declines with age even for experts (similarity 0.91)
• Listener judgment reliability declines with age and accumulated noise exposure (similarity 0.90)
• Hearing loss makes listener opinions unreliable no matter how experienced (similarity 0.85)
• Even modest hearing loss increases variability in sound quality judgments (similarity 0.83)
• Age-related hearing decline in noise begins while thresholds remain normal (similarity 0.83)
• Both working memory and speech-in-noise ability decline with age. (similarity 0.83)
• Temporal-structure sensitivity declines with age even when audiograms remain normal. (similarity 0.83)
• Hearing sensitivity within clinically normal range still declines measurably with age (similarity 0.82)
• Hearing loss correlates strongly with age even among listeners with clinically near-normal thresholds (similarity 0.81)
• Age-related temporal and level sensitivity decline precedes measurable hearing loss (similarity 0.81)
• Frequency selectivity, not temporal processing, drives age-related declines in Huggins-pitch thresholds. (similarity 0.80)
• Audio mixers’ occupational hearing loss can impair their sound-quality judgments (similarity 0.80)
• Age-related hearing decline begins even with clinically normal pure-tone audiograms (similarity 0.79)
• Aging degrades envelope-based binaural phase discrimination independent of hearing loss (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Critical listening ability declines with age even for experts #corroborates (0.95) — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1802
• Audio mixers’ occupational hearing loss can impair their sound-quality judgments #exemplifies (0.85) — , Toole, Floyd E - Sound reproduction-…, 1246
• Temporal-structure sensitivity declines with age even when audiograms remain normal. #corroborates (0.82) — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 793
• Much age-related hearing decline stems from environmental noise, not aging itself #qualifies (0.72) — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 621