I just came across this little hearing test. It's fairly simple if you want to give it a try. I only started to hear the test tone when the voice-over said "15 kHz". I was wondering what is the max frequency that others hear?

I'm 48 y.o. BTW.

http://audiocheck.net/audiotests_frequencycheckhigh.php

I heard 19k ( I had no idea i could hear that high) in my left ear and 18k in my right one.

Hi jm, If you don't mind revealing - what is your age?


Edit : No need, I just checked your birthdate in your profile. You're only 18 y.o.

17k for me (I'm 19).

I did a similar test several years ago and I could hear up to 22 KHz.

I prefer not to take this test. It will ruin my mood for a day at least.

If I generate a sine waves with Audacity I can hear 20 KHz. Using this test I was only able to hear 18 KHz.

I'm 21 BTW.

I don't know if it's because I'm only 19, or my laptop's crummy soundcard or my crappy 3 year old iPod stock headphones, but I could hear all the frequencies from right at the beginning.

And from what I can tell, the sound doesn't start until he starts to say the word "two" in twenty-two.




I did the low one as well, but I couldn't hear until about halfway between the 20Hz and 30Hz. But that could be the crappy 'phones fault.

The test file is at 44.1kHz.

Do you know if your soundcard is resampling at 48kHz?

(BTW, this is a general question to anyone who isn't already aware of this phenomenon)

Woohoo! 16kHz (17 maybe). Age = 43.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

How could I find out if my card is resampling? It's an inbuilt thingy in a Toshiba A30-303 laptop.

That's from the first paragraph of that page. Then, on the last paragraph



This *is* important. I've heard sometimes some tests that caused troubles like the ones described in there.


Just for completeness, i heard from 17Khz down (i'm 28, so i'm going down already )

Edit: I actually hear from somewhere between 18Khz and 17Khz. Did the mosquito test too, and can hear it. (although i have to put the volume up a bit)

That's a bad choice to offer the sample at 44 kHz speed.

Here is the same file resampled to 48 kHz for those that think kmixer or their soundcard might be filtering due to resampling
http://shup.com/Shup/57684/audiocheck.net_...ycheckhigh.flac

??? I can hear the sound right fom the beginning ???

1: I am 30 year old
2: my CPU fan is noisy (I thought it would mask it)
3: I can hear it right from the speaker I didn't even focus or used my headphones like I do when I ABX hard sample sometimes.

I never did such a test for myself so I am very surprised specially because of my age.

I recall I did a test like this when I did my military service ... the game was to guess if the sound was coming from the right, left, both or none ... guessing from the mood of the military guy behind the glass I thought I won the game at that time

Is it normal from a medical point of view to be able to listen to 22Khz noise at 30 year old ? personnaly I was expecting 19-20Khz as I knew I was not deaf ... but I right now am very surprised by my ears myself ... thks for the link

Mmm.... there's also a test for decibels

http://audiocheck.net/testtones_dynamic.php

This one reproduces pink noise at full scale, followed by pink noise x dB's lower (so it's a good test to not fake it).

Playing at full volume (with this laptop) with the headphones i can hear down to the 72dB one (probably more), although at the usual volume i listen, i couldn't hear the 66dB one.

Yeah I looked at the waveform in an editor and that's exectly where it starts, it's just after the word twenty and exactly at the begining of the word two. You must be part bat AliL


Oh dear, so far at 15Khz I'm the lowest

One good thing though, I don't have to worry about the default low pass filter settings in my lame -V3 encodes

Actually that was one of the reasons I did the test. I took the the original wave file and then I encoded it with my normal settings (lame3.98 -V3) and then decoded it back to wav. Then I did the test, first on original wav file and then on the decoded mp3 file. In a wav editor I could clearly see that the first few seconds of the tone had completely vanished in the decoded mp3 file, it only started 18kHz for this waveform. But for me it made absolutely no difference, it was a good 2.5 to 3 seconds after the tone kicked in (at 18k) before I could hear it in either case. Phew, what a relief

I had similar thoughts, hence why I'm so happy. I encode everything with LAME at -V3, and the lowpass filter imposed at this setting has very nearly no effect on what I hear. It's conveniently confirmed for me that, in that respect at least, I've chosen exactly the right setting for me personally for maximum compression efficiency.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

Did you hear the frequency going up, or down, when playing 22, 21, 20, 19, 18?
I ask this, because as I said above, (and is briefly explained in the test page), The hardware can play a role here, and most often than not, listening with speakers and with AC-07 soundcards, what you hear are in fact aliasing sounds and ressonances, rather than the real tone.

You could start trying with the headphones and see if you can also hear it, but the soundcard could still have an effect.
To avoid it, play the sample that benski posted instead of the one in the website.

I downloaded the file and was clearly able to hear at 17kHz (using some basic earphones).
When I moused over the download link though I could hear it right from the start. I suspect that all playback routes are not equal.

I'll have to test later with a quieter environment and better speakers.

blah ... it's only 17Khz with benski's file ... you ruined my day

As was said earlier, speakers/headphones are not likely to make any difference, nor is the environment provided that you have you're playing back at normal levels for that environment. The tones in this sample are extremely loud.

I've seen cheap integrated CODECs in older motherboards and laptops that can't even play 48000 samples-per-second material. The page describes what exactly you should hear: a clean sine wave slowly decreasing in frequency. If you hear multiple tones going up and down, the test has failed.

18.5 kHz @ 27 years.

somewhere between 21 and 22kHz and now I have a monster headache (28 years old)

gnypp45: 16.5 kHz @ 37 years

uart: 15 kHz @ 48 years

That's about 2 kHz every 10 years.

I could hear 18kHz at 24 years old.

With benski's file I can hear the sound at 19 kHz. I'm 22 years old by the way.

17K @ 37 (I'm not old!), but that was with speakers (not headphones) in a less-than-ideal listening environment.

between 17-18 khz 26 years old

12 kHz, I think (age 62). I heard several quiet up and down sweeps first, but then a solid high frequency tone just at the end.

between 19-20 kHz in the right ear and 14-15 in the left, I'm 19.

I've been strictly wearing ear protection at concerts and just listened to low volume over my headphones... And then I got issues with blood circulation in my left ear.

How do you get a 17kHz sine wave from a 48kHz sample? ...You can't! You can get a waveform with an average frequency of 17kHz. And, that's good enough for regular audio reproduction... I'm not trying to start-up another sample-rate debate.

A 17kHz sine wave has alternating positive and negative peaks every 29.4 uS (a period of 58.8 uS). At 48kHz, you get one sample every 20.8 uS. Those original peaks are lost as soon as you sample. There is just no way that the digital-to-analog converter can reproduce the original waveform! The sample-points don't "line up" with where the positive/negative peaks need to be.

I know Nyquist says you can theoretically reconstruct the original 17kHz sine wave (given enough samples over a long-enough time). But, DACs and soundcards don't do that kind of mathematical analysis or processing... They just spit-out a series of data-points (analog voltages), one at a time, with low pass filtering to smooth-out the waveform.

Then why post such nonsense?

This isn't an accurate description of how a DAC works at all. PCM values are NOT voltage values of the waveform over time. They are an impulse train that can be used to create a given waveform. They are NOT values of that given waveform. The fact that the waveform and the PCM values look nearly identical at values far less than Nyquist is what gives many people the impression that PCM values are supposed to mirror the analog waveform.

Who said you'd have to do that?

17K with speakers and background noise. 34 years old.

18k in the left ear, 17k in the right. 26.

19k, 23.

Thank you *starts singing the batman theme*

However, Im confused. With the sample on the website I heard the noise right from the off, but using benski's file I can only hear it from just before the 18KHz, I guess about 18.2KHz. Which is the correct value?

I still couldn't hear anything at 12KHz.

64, using speakers. Tinnitus a little bit loud this morning.

Not too surprised, since on another test I started hearing the tone between 11 and 12 K.

Or, why I don't help with listening tests.

What kind of soundcard do you have? There's definitely audio right from 22khz in the file I posted.

That's the thing, I don't really know what soundcard i have. It's inbuilt into my 5 year old laptop. A Toshiba Satellite A30-303. When I bring up the sounds menu in control panel and the device manager, it says Realtek AC97 Audio. I don't know if that means anything to you, but it means nothing to me.

42 years old, 16kHz was the first one clearly audible (17kHz was more of a sense that there is a sound).

17khz at 24 years old.

About 16.5 to 17 khz, age 28.

@AliL
Unlike the one posted on the site, benski's file should work properly with all soundcards.

Hi,
Okay, here goes. I am the youngest member yet to have taken this test (I'm only 15).
I was able to hear a distinct shreek right when the voice started to say 21K, which doesn't surprise me because my similar personal tests are showing the same thing.
BTW, my stepdad, who is almost 47, and who used to listen to loud rock music with headphones, cannot hear 15KHZ tones, when my stepsister had her ears covered and her face buried in her shirt...

21khz @ 22 yo I have tried with better headphones. Scary stuff

This is a neat test. Using speakers I heard 19k with the original file, and on benski's 48k file I heard 21k. I'm 36 and have played in loud bands since being teenage. I started using earplugs sometime in my 20s, but still I have slight tinnitus symptoms since about 4 years ago.

I heard a tone all the way through the original WAVE.

With Benski's I started hearing a tone after he said 20K and just before he said 19K.

I'll have to re-read this thread to see what this means, but from greynol's post above I guess I should only pay attention to Benski's file.

I am 38, listening on headphones. I'm not sure that I've admitted my age on this board before.

BTW, using foobar's tone:// feature (File > Add Location... > "tone://22000") I can hear tone://23000 but not tone://24000. Is this relevant?

Edit: Hmm, just used "sweep://24000-10000,24" and that produces all sorts of weird and wonderful effects, so I guess this is still being affected by my soundcard (work machine, Aida32 reports it an ALi M5455 AC'97 Audio Controller).