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Nice find there Bourne!

This is my result:


LOL... you must be half deaf if you can't hear 16Khz/-6dB, for me its sufficiently loud.

you must have faked the test

I can hear the 16kHz at -42db on my speakers.

EDIT: that's as low as i can go without having to turn the volume up or use headphones.

ok, i did this test using a tiny crap headphone... tomorrow I will use the speakers...

Bad result (30Hz at -12), so my speakers and headphones are bad, not my ears.

Why would I fake the test, for others to think I am better?

One thing I forgot to say is that I did the test with my supraaural headphones, my PC tower is always under the table, plus here in Montreal, it’s the middle of the night, no sound from outside or inside and windows are closed. Apart from for the air conditioning, which I turned off for the test, it's very quiet here. What else can I say???

Each human is different, some can hear all ranges, some only parts, some have trouble hearing and some are born completely deaf, what can you do about that, its nature. I have eyeglasses to see better, some don't.

Too tired to hear right now, but iirc I can hear 20Khz easily.

I can hear 16kHz but I have to boost the volume by +60dB compared with my 1kHz reference. Ouch.

you see... no "turn the volume up thing" ok? LOL... you are supposed to test with the volume your system is actually and mostly stuck to, that is, the every-day volume use...

if you try this with a 60 year old person, you will find out that they have a lot of trouble with the 12KHz, being that 16KHz is totally nill to them.

I just redid the test, but this time in the middle of the day, and this time, in average, you can add about two to four notches in each category from the result I posted above, not as good as yesterday with a very quiet environment. In addition, it won't work well if you don't use headphones, as prescribed in the "How to" of that test page. For fun, I also tried with the speakers, and the result is very bad.

Hmm... in my case that's max for headphone use and 1/5th for speakers. I'll have to try this when I get home.

http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/5028/shot00018hf0.jpg
ER-4B @ threshold.
Looks about right.

Air conditioning? Y fait frette dehors!

Don't forget to add the frequency response of your headphones to your results. You can get them here : http://www.headphone.com/technical/product...s/build-a-graph
They can introduce corrections up to +/- 20 dB.

My hearing :

pio, I got actually very close results to YOURS.... we're humans right? LOL

But with what headphones or speakers ? The few results that we got within the french objectivist audio forum outlined rather the characteristics of the listener's headphones than his or her hearing.

http://chaud7.forum-gratuit.com/viewtopic.php?t=319

Then I'm not human because I can hear 16 khz clearly at least down to -30 dB, right? and -45 db in deep silence around me.

this is mine with Sennesier HD447 and audigy 24 bit card. I think I hear better woman voices 1.5-3 khz . Or even young girl.

Mine, with Sony V6 phones & M-Audio 2496. I'm 40, with at least 30 years of too loud music in my past/present.

it would be interesting to actually have the 18, 19 and 20 KHz columns just so that we would KNOW who can hear what!

The difference from 12 to 16 is way big, I imagine 16 to 18 then... would be much HARDER...

My chart doesn't have a pretty curve, Philips HE591 canalphones / SB Audigy, at music-listening level:



And this is with the PC fans a foot away.

You can forget the 16 kHz column with Audigy or onboard soundcards. All you will hear is an aliasing around 10 kHz, because the website outputs 44100 Hz and those soundcards resample to 48 kHz.

Interesting. I tested my threshold of hearing. For that I turned my soundcard volume to slightly above usual listening level, to that which I'd use for songs that I'd like and wish to listen at to get most of detail, but not hurting my ears. Still, volume level is such that you'd not listen to more than half an hour before it gets unhealthy. I think my headphones generate about 100-105db SPL for 1KHz@0db selection.


For me the result is surprising, because I'm 36 and should do much worse. The 16Khz tone isn't clearly tonal for me at such low levels and I don't hear it consistently. I have a tinnitus at around 15Khz and I guess that makes me for some reason more sensitive to 16Khz than I should be. I can clearly hear it tonally at -30db, below that I feel its presence, pressure in my ears and change in tinnitus.

There's an interesting thing about it - I noticed my threshold of hearing is fluctuating. I couldn't hear at first the levels in picture, I had to listen at higher volumes, and then go down. What happens, is that its hard to hear when you don't know what to listen for, but when you clearly hear a tone, its much easier to notice it way down. When later coming back to same tones, it would seem like you could sometimes hear, sometimes not, until again you "train" your hearing with higher volumes, and then you can notice the faintest tone with some confidence.

Still, I wonder now, how much could placebo affect such test? And how to elimintate it?

My headphones are AKG401, basically same transducers as in AKG501:

Playback on my hp-compaq notebook that doesn't resample.

Btw, Pio, it is difficult to account for headphone frequency response. The graphs on headroom are wrong above ~3KHz. They use a dummy head to estimate perceived frequency response, but do it without properly accounting for inear resonances that occur between ear canal and headphones (very difficult to do). The drops in FR near 5 and 11Khz are intentional by manufacturers, as is smooth rolloff between ~100-1Khz. But how much FR nonlinearity is right and how much is due to imperfection is very difficult to extract.

Equal loudness perception with 1Khz reference set to -30db:

Here are my results... Interesting. Either my hearing becomes very bad at 12kHz and above, or my audio equipment is just to bad. For the test I used: Creative Soundblaster AWE32 ISA and Behringer HPS3000 headphones.

Hmm, maybe I did something wrong, but I start out at 30Hz = -51db, then gradually go down, and at 375Hz its at -90db, and stays there throughout the test...

Edit: of course, with minor variations, but it stays in that area

I thought id test this with some speakers. M-Audio Revolution 5.1 -> Acoustic Energy Aego 2 set just above my normal listening volume. Theres a crossover set at 80hz which I think may explain the poor performance in the lowest few frequencies. Other than that I think its very good for speakers.

people that are acquiring perfect results must be using a very good equipment and above normal volume usage, that is, they lift up the volume much more than the daily use.

Under normal circunstances (no hitting the volume knob) the 16KHz is pretty useless after the 3rd block.

Audiophile 2496 > Arcam A85 > HD600.

edit: I was torn between leaving the 16k where it is or bumping it up one. It was too unpleasant (not so much too loud, just very unpleasant )on the higher setting so left it where it was.