Which is the highest frequency that You can hear? Options

[IgorC]

It will be interesing to see hearing abilities of Hydrogenaudio's members.

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-yo...s-hearing-test/

Please perform the test on your normal loudness levels.

[marc2003]

just 12kHz here. 35 years old.

This post has been edited by marc2003: Feb 24 2012, 01:49

[eahm]

just 12kHz here. 35 years old.

I can ensure you I hear better than anyone I know and I can hear only up to 12kHz like you...I'll be 30 in 5 days

[Batman321]

17 KHz here.

35 Years old.

[kraut]

via earphones 15kHz, 62 years.

[IgorC]

As headphones genereally are more revealing, I'd think people who use them will report higher frequencies.

29 y.o. here and 16 kHz (voted) on a normal volume. Increasing the volume helped to actually more feel than hear 17 kHz in my case.
Cranking the volume even more leads to some noises on 17 kHz and high frequencies files. What I hear isn't actually an indicated frequenices (17... 22 kHz) but some alien noises (besides of the obvious clicking at the begining and in the end of the files)

This post has been edited by IgorC: Feb 24 2012, 04:41

[Xrcr9709]

I hear up to 15kHz, I "guess" a sound at 16 and 17 kHz. (30 years old)
So I chekced 15kHz

[sizetwo]

17 khz, 36 year old using speakers.

[Kujibo]

As headphones genereally are more revealing, I'd think people who use them will report higher frequencies.

29 y.o. here and 16 kHz (voted) on a normal volume. Increasing the volume helped to actually more feel than hear 17 kHz in my case.
Cranking the volume even more leads to some noises on 17 kHz and high frequencies files. What I hear isn't actually an indicated frequenices (17... 22 kHz) but some alien noises (besides of the obvious clicking at the begining and in the end of the files)

I first did the test with decent 3 way speakers and scored 14 kHz. However the thought that perhaps my speakers might not be up to the higher frequencies I tried with a decent pair of closed back headphones to see if something different would result. With the headphones I score up to 18 kHz, though things still roll off pretty quick after 14 kHz. The closed back headphones make a huge difference in blocking out all the normal whine that goes on around me and helps a lot. So yes, I think there is going to be a large difference given the listening environment.

With the web test things start to sound a bit funky at the high frequencies though, 18 kHz sounds a bit strange, almost sounds like something might be folding back down into the lower frequencies so I gotta wonder about the test/equipment. Or maybe that's how ears perceive something on the threshold of audibility. Honestly I'm not sure how the highest frequencies really should be perceived, maybe the highest frequencies might naturally present with less energy? I actually "feel" something for 19 through 22 kHz, meaning I can tell there is a difference between on and off but I can't make out any tone, I wonder if it's just the energy presenting itself given the closed back headphones. At 22 kHz I feel nothing though.

Actually the slightly odd web results made me wonder so I just fired up Audacity and generated a bunch of 96 kHz sine waves with fade ins (to avoid the clicks so I can really tell between off and on). This is driving my onboard DAC at 96 kHz. I get different results from this web test. Interestingly I can hear sines fairly well up to 16500 Hz, then at 16600 Hz I can't hear anything. It's a very steep drop off in between those two frequencies. I don't perceive any of the folding back down to lower frequencies or weirdness I get with the web test, I can't hear anything after my cutoff at all and it all sounds as expected up to the cutoff.

So I have to wonder about the quality of that web test or how it ends up driving the DAC. My gut feeling is that the sine waves are recorded at some frequency that isn't going to match up to the DAC rate and we'll be hearing aliasing that is ever so easy to notice on sine waves from whatever resampling algorithm our audio stack/hardware is performing, and it's going to be different on each users system too. The test is all flash based so who knows what is going on in there.

41 here.

[onkl]

I had to record the output just to check if there's actually something playing. The rolloff after 17khz is extremely steep and I could only hear 18khz because I knew something was there. I'm 27.

I guess the flash player > browser > windows mixer chain is not so well suited for this test.

[halb27]

'folding back down to lower frequencies' phenomen here too with my environment. That's why I think we shouldn't pay too much attention to this experiment.

Another thing that came to my mind. Formerly I thought things for us aging people is as this experiments suggests: From the age of 20 or so we're starting to loose our ability to hear extremely high frequencies. Some day however I read that's not totally correct. One point is that people's fading abilities in this respect do vary a lot. It's not rare that rather old people aren't bad at all in hearing high frequencies. On the other hand the focus is too much on extremely high frequencies whereas for many people decreasing hearing abilities start at a few kHz which is much more relevant.

@Kujibo: do you mind sharing your test files with us?

This post has been edited by halb27: Feb 24 2012, 10:09

[dhromed]

30 years. ~17.2KHz using a 16-18KHz sweep in foobar2000, through 6 year old Sennheiser HD555 Headphones.

Basically played the sweep both ways, and hit pause as soon as I couldn't hear anything anymore / began hearing something. Rolloff is very smooth.

I am uncertain whether this is a limitation of my ears or of my audio pipeline, but most certain is that in real music, anything over 16Khz is completely drowned out by the lower content. I'll do the actual test linked above some time later.

There's an interesting track by Autechre which contains an incredibly powerful continuous sound meandering around 18Khz. It' clearly visible in the spectrograph. It has a crazy multi-band run-in and run-out, and I can hear those, but the actual whine is entirely missing. I suppose they put it in to scare off children and people with healthy ears.

[skamp]

I'm almost 30 years old, and I could hear all the tones up to 17kHz included clear as day with headphones at normal volume. I could barely hear the 18kHz tone however.

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

30 years. ~17.2KHz using a 16-18KHz sweep in foobar2000, through 6 year old Sennheiser HD555 Headphones.

Listening tests involving frequency sweeps are not representative of how we hear high frequencies in most music. Music is generally not composed of pure tones, but fundamental notes and their harmonics. Many musical notes that are played on musical instruments have the same fundamental frequency and/or low harmonics (which the ear can confuse). We identify music as being produced by certain instruments by the harmonic content and the shaping of the amplitude envelope of the notes.

Typically, it is masking of upper harmonics that controls our ability to hear their presence or absence.

There is very limited transfer of knowledge about how you hear high frequency pure tones to how you hear the effects of brick wall filters.

People use things like the sheen and air of musical instruments like cymbals as mental references for estimating the high frequency bandpass of audio systems. How many reviews have you read that included comments about the reproduction of sounds like brushed cymbals? However, brushed cymbals are not necessarily the best musical instruments to listen to to see if you can hear the effects of a brick wall filter at 16 KHz.

There's an interesting track by Autechre which contains an incredibly powerful continuous sound meandering around 18Khz. It' clearly visible in the spectrograph. It has a crazy multi-band run-in and run-out, and I can hear those, but the actual whine is entirely missing. I suppose they put it in to scare off children and people with healthy ears.

That is of course very, very atypical.

[C.R.Helmrich]

If you are running Windows 7 (or Vista probably), I highly recommend reading this post before doing the test.

With the wrong settings (i.e. triggering Windows' terrible resampler), I could detect even the 21-kHz tone because I could hear lower-frequency distortion tones.

Chris

[dhromed]

Listening tests involving frequency sweeps are not representative of how we hear high frequencies in most music. Music is generally not composed of pure tones, but fundamental notes and their harmonics.

Hence my comment about real music.

It is absolutely necessary to test real-world claims with real-world music, but there's no harm in establishing some hard upper bound. If you can't hear even a loud, pure tone above 18KHz, then redbook is defnitely enough for you.

In fact I did a small test with one original file and one downsampled to 32000Hz. I was unable to ABX those, though it was muddy rock with not much power in the far highs.

[pdq]

Only up to 12 kHz (tested two years ago when I was 63).

Edit: I wish the results had been grouped by age range, so that we could plot the average loss vs. age.

This post has been edited by pdq: Feb 24 2012, 14:33

[Martel]

This test is totally messed up under Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), Firefox 10 and Flash Player 11.0.1.152, the base tone is literally buried in aliasing artifacts. Interestingly enough, running Foobar 2000 under Winde does not produce anything like that.

I can hear 18kHz at age of 31 using the audiocheck.net sample and Sennheiser HD 215 headphones.

[LithosZA]

Up to 18Khz in foobar2000 WASAPI output -> 16bit(dithering enabled).
Up to 17Khz in on http://www.noiseaddicts.com with Firefox 9.0.1 and Flash Player 10.3.183.7 (I don't know if it is a problem with the tone or Flash Player's fault)

Used a pair of Sennheiser HD-280 Pros through a Total Bithead.
Edit: I am 27

This post has been edited by LithosZA: Feb 24 2012, 15:56

[zipr]

Equipment and environment can make a big difference here, I'd imagine. I tried with two different pairs of headphones in a relatively (but not completely) quiet room. One pair of headphones, I could only hear to 14. With the other, I could get to 16 or 17.

42 years old here.

[kode54]

15KHz and 30 years old.

Also, be careful with not only your equipment, but any signal processing. For instance, I forgot to disable my X-Fi's CMSS 3D, and/or try the onboard sound without headphone virtualization, and also try them with speakers. With the X-Fi and CMSS 3D enabled, I was able to hear the 17KHz but not the 16KHz, which made no sense, until I turned up the volume and noticed that the 17KHz was emitting white noise.

[mjb2006]

With the web test things start to sound a bit funky at the high frequencies though, 18 kHz sounds a bit strange, almost sounds like something might be folding back down into the lower frequencies

...quite likely, if playing audio through a web browser on Windows:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en...a-47e51de9c3ae/
(there's also an interesting tool mentioned in that thread which can be used to capture the actual signal going out to the DAC)

I suggest downloading the WAV clips from http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2010/10/hearing-loss-test/ and playing them directly in an audio player app. Even then, there's no guarantee against aliasing. It's so hard to diagnose and resolve this kind of thing. It also means it's possible that people think they can hear the 18+ KHz tones, when in fact they are hearing aliased/"ghost" tones at lower frequencies.

[Remedial Sound]

There's an interesting track by Autechre which contains an incredibly powerful continuous sound meandering around 18Khz. It' clearly visible in the spectrograph. It has a crazy multi-band run-in and run-out, and I can hear those, but the actual whine is entirely missing. I suppose they put it in to scare off children and people with healthy ears.

Out of curiosity, which track? I'm a big Autechre fan but have never heard (of) this.

[halb27]

16 kHz, age 62.
Thank you, mjb2006, for the link to the wav files.
16 kHz sounds clean now (using foobar), but 17 to 19 kHz sounds like a broad band noise in my environment. 20 kHz sounds like a lower frequency again.

[lvqcl]

Out of curiosity, which track? I'm a big Autechre fan but have never heard (of) this.

Second Bad Vilbel?

There was 26-sec sample badvilbel.flac at http://www.ff123.net/samples.html but it seems that this site is no more.