Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.

Poll

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear (at normal loudness level)?

8 kHz
[ 1 ] (0.9%)
10 kHz
[ 2 ] (1.8%)
12 kHz
[ 11 ] (9.7%)
14 kHz
[ 7 ] (6.2%)
15 kHz
[ 17 ] (15%)
16 kHz
[ 18 ] (15.9%)
17 kHz
[ 27 ] (23.9%)
18 kHz
[ 13 ] (11.5%)
19 kHz
[ 5 ] (4.4%)
20 kHz and higher
[ 12 ] (10.6%)

Total Members Voted: 126

Topic: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear? (Read 48389 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #75
I guess I'll just mark it down to bad luck on my part / problems with Audition's playback engine / some unknown black magick and continue to use alternatives ;-) I'd edit my previous post to take note of this but it seems I can't edit it? Not sure why, as I can edit this one fine. Has an age threshold been imposed for editing older posts which I missed? I'm not a frequent HA forum visitor.
Don't forget International Talk Like A Pirate Day! September the 19th!

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #76
So I guess the take home here is that 74% of people can't hear 18kHz, and another 13% of people have sound cards that alias so badly (for 44.1kHz anyway) that it doesn't matter how high they can hear

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #77
That's mine conclusion as well.

Just a simple thinking. It's well known that 20 kHz is much  harder to hear than 19 kHz (equal loudness contour curves).
But here we have it absolutely wrong.

Also notice a sharp roll-off for the results >18 kHz.

17 kHz - 25 votes
18 kHz - 13 votes
19 kHz - only 3 votes.
20 kHZ and more - should be much less than 3 votes if normal distribution (or any other similar) is considered .

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #78
20kHz or more is the sum of bins 20kHz, 21kHz and 22kHz, so I don't find it all that unreasonable that it may be bigger than the bin for 19kHz.  I'm not so sure that it's reasonable for it to be over three times the number of votes for 19kHz, as it stands at this point in time, however.

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #79
Yep, I was thinking of that too.

Considering each next bin should have less votes than the previous one:
18 kHz - 13 votes
19 kHz - 3 votes
20 kHZ - 1 vote (?) 
21 kHz - 0.xx (?)
22 kHz - 0.xx - 0.0x  (?)

The sum of votes for  20,21 and 22 kHz still should be less than for 19 kHz considering  my previous theory.

Or it's simply aliasing issue uniformly distributed starting from 19 kHz.
19 kHz - 3 votes
20,21,22 - 3*3 - 9 votes (close to 10).

It could be the case.

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #80
I don't find it unreasonable to think that there could be legitimate votes for 21 and 22, even at this early stage in the game.  We are (hopefully) talking about real breathing human beings after all.

Now if there were separate bins for 20, 21 and 22 and we saw that 22 had more votes than the other two then this would be quite telling!

I'll close this poll and you can start a new one if you like.  You can have a second question that breaks 18 - 22 down into individual bins and leave the other as it is, providing proper instruction that the second question only be answered if applicable in addition to having those individuals also make a choice in the first question.  This way we can see if the participants are good at following directions, since the number of votes for question two should equal the sum of applicable votes in question one.

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #81
Great, Greynol.


But wait. This time lets think  how to make new poll better. It can be better to provide  direct links to files with readme.txt?

Suggestions, please.

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #82
Suggestions, please.

Maybe it would be simpler to just ask people what age (and to a lesser extent sex) they are?
http://www.roger-russell.com/hearing/hearing4.jpg

This way we don't need to worry about aliasing noise, artifacts, clicks, spurious subharmonics mistaken as the target signal, speakers with reduced acoustical power response in the top octaves due to limited off axis dispersion, SRC issues, web browser issues, placebo effect, artificially loud listening levels, background room noises obscuring (masking) better results, etc., etc..

The odds we are going to find some >30 year old male forum member* who can actually hear >20kHz is pretty slim if you ask me.

*(heck even much past 20 years old according to some)
---

From my understanding, there are two different kinds of high frequency loss due to "age": the loss seen in the averaging of audiograms such as the one I linked to above, which is related to life long exposures to industrial civilization's noise (i.e.. what happens at 8kHz) and then there's the one this poll is asking about, above 8kHz going to 20kHz or even higher, which unfortunately is not studied as much because it has little importance to speech intelligibility or practical hearing aid design. For this top octave, simply asking "what age are you?" is all you need to know, and there are very few "supermen/women". [Sorry, I have no graph to back this.]

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #83
The graphs show what I wrote about earlier in this thread: hearing loss starts at a few kHz.
The other point that people's hearing abilities in this respect do vary a lot is shown by this test (and as far as frequencies lower than 16 kHz are concerned I guess the test is not spoiled by aliasing effects).
Averaging statistics doesn't help here. That's why you can't simply ask for the age.
lame3995o -Q1.7 --lowpass 17

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #84
17 kHz, 23 years old. I hear 17 kHz pretty clearly but I can just about make out 18 kHz when cracking up the volume and paying very close attention, so I felt 17 is the most appropriate option to pick.

Oh, this is on Win7 with SoundBlaster X-Fi, Sennheiser HD 595.

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #85
I donwloaded the samples in wav then listened to them in Foobar (no resampling or anything) at the same level I usually listen to music, with good AKG headphones. I can hear up to 15 Khz pretty good, but that's it. I'm surprised, though: I'm 53 and guessed my audition was much worse.

 

Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?

Reply #86
Strange: using the noiseaddicts.com test I can hear up to 14kHz, but with the audiocheck.net test (tone over voice) I can distinctly hear up to 15kHz. Probably they are at different levels...

Win7 64/Firefox 10/Intel DP35DP motherboard ADC/Revox B150/Sennheiser HD430

I'm almost 57 now. Last time I checked (probably a bit more than 10 years ago) I was able to hear up to 19kHz, and so... I'm a little sad now 

smz
Sergio
M-Audio Delta AP + Revox B150 + (JBL 4301B | Sennheiser Amperior | Sennheiser HD598)