Can't Hear Above 13.5kHz. What Am I Missing? Options

[botface]

Using pure tones at "normal" listening levels I can't hear above 13.5kHz. I was disappointed with that result initially, but on thinking about it I'm not sure.

Assuming the usual 20kHz ceiling for perfect hearing that equates to a D# (give or take a few cents). 10kHz is also D# but 1 octave lower. My 13.5kHz limit is more or less a G#, which is a perfect 4th above the 10kHz D#, or to put it another way I can hear more or less half of the top octave. Given that there are no fundamentals from real instruments up there then at worst I'm losing some upper harmonics.

Add to this the fact that many people found MP3 low passed at 16KHz to be perceptually transparent - and I'm only 2.5kHz short of this - and I'm wondering what I'm actually missing.

I'm sure there are many 20 year olds that could easily ABX a suitable "full range" sample and that same sample low passed at 13.5kHz but how would the difference manifest itself and does it really matter (in a musical sense)?

This post has been edited by botface: Mar 28 2012, 17:13

[andrew_berge]

An interesting thought is that the artists and sound engineers themselves might not have perfect hearing, and you might end up hearing stuff that wasn't intended to be there in the higher frequencies.

The song 'All I Need' by Radiohead comes to mind. I'm not sure what happened to this track, but there's a ~16kHz tone all through it, and it's really annoying when you notice it.

[dhromed]

An interesting thought is that the artists and sound engineers themselves might not have perfect hearing, and you might end up hearing stuff that wasn't intended to be there in the higher frequencies.

The song 'All I Need' by Radiohead comes to mind. I'm not sure what happened to this track, but there's a ~16kHz tone all through it, and it's really annoying when you notice it.

There's some intermittent warble around 16K and an occasional monitor tone at 14+K. I'm surprised anybody can hear these, since they are really very quiet, even if clearly visible in a spectrograph. They're about 40dB less than the intro.

Perhaps my version is a different master somehow?

But your point is made — I don't think that 16K warble would have made it to the final product if any of the engineers on that album had heard it.

This post has been edited by dhromed: Apr 3 2012, 20:48