We are all speculating as nobody knows the full, accurate model of our sense of hearing. I have a view that it is more than a frequency analysis but I could be wrong. Not being an expert in the field, I don't know enough about the details to set forth a convincing enough argument (anyway, there will always be someone who takes the contrary view). I realise that this how we test our viewpoints & possibly adjust or change them completely (yea, like that's going to happen
).
I will take away from this the adjustment to my thinking that maybe a reduction in the ear's sensitivity to hearing the top octave does not cause us much degradation in our abilities to listen fully to music. In fact it causes so little that we still hear music as we did when our hearing was not degraded. Or that we think we do because our auditory memory is not reliable over a long window.
I was hoping that others might also be open to the notion that there is more going on with our hearing than just a frequency analysis & therefore a reduction in the top octave sensitivity might not be of such importance.
I was also hoping that in the spirit of the thread's title that we might have a reasonable discussion much like the one I started reading on ABX testing (which I expected to be incendiary but wasn't).
As titled "The more I learn, the less I know" - I already freely admitted that this is the case with me. I also think, as Plinius says, I proved it in this thread
.Others have done an exemplary job in also demonstrating this.
So let's all step back from the plate for a bit & realise that none of us are experts in the field of hearing & it is a very complicated area of investigation. Let's all take a moment to realise that we don't know it all!