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Topic: Simple Hearing Test (Read 87167 times) previous topic - next topic
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Simple Hearing Test

Reply #75 –
Quote
' date='Aug 21 2008, 22:49' post='583990']
Quote from: smok3 on

no for 22, yes for 21 to 18, then no for 17, then again yes. hmmm.


If that happened with the sample on the webpage, try with the one benski posted in this link http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....65398&st=0#

But from your description, it probably is 17Khz for you too.
Of course, it also means that your equipment can't properly reproduce 44Khz content.


got 16k with that sample and i'am not 17 anymore no.....
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #76 –
Quote from: JRace on
Ummm...you all realize that this test is horrible inacurate?
Can your speakers properly output 20kHz and are they calbrated (referenced to 1Khz @ 0dB HL)?
--This is considered the Audiological standard.

I think everyone is fairly clear that this test is, like the subject says, simple. But it's a useful quick and dirty guide to what can be heard on one's own equipment.

I see people beating up on themselves because they can only hear 15KHz. I, as the definite low scorer on this test so far, console myself with the thought that the diff between me and a super-sharp teen is just one octave. More realistically, two harmonics on the top note on the piano. Any idea how much difference this would make to the timbre of the sound? For obvious reasons, this is one I can't test for myself.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #77 –
Somewhere between 18k and 19k on both ears, 27 years old.  I'm fairly happy about that, considering the hears of playing in orchestras with unprotected ears, shotgun blasts while hunting, and loud concerts.

These noises are WAY painful though.  I think I'd rather not hear them.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #78 –
Quote
Doug that is such a common misconception....

...We have to try and dispel this myth.

see image here :

uart,

Wow!   That looks GOOD!!!!!  Thanks for posting that image.    Your output is much better than my soundchip...  (Also says Realtek AC'97).  I wish I could capture the output from my 'scopes, but I don't have the capability*...  I hope you don't think I'm lying about my results! 

When I posted before, I was "talking theory".  I had never hooked a 'scope to a soundcard.  But, I knew I was going to stur-up trouble,  So, I decided I should try it (which I did before I read your post).

I made a 17kHz file. Then I hooked up an analog 'scope, which happens to be on the same bench as the only computer in my "work area" with a soundcard.

There was quite a bit of "jitter", especially amplitude jitter, which made the analog 'scope almost useless.  But, although the waveform image was messed-up I could see that the waveform was fairly rectangular and stair-stepped.  I didn't expect that... I expected the low-pass filter to do a lot more smoothing.

So I brought-over the digital 'scope which can capture a single sweep, jitter or not.  When I captured single-sweeps, the waveform looked alot like the zoomed-in waveform on my audio editor, except th stair-steps were slightly rounded.    The digital 'scope has a frequency counter, but the jitter wouldn't allow a steady reading.  It was jumping between about 16kHz and 25kHz.  The period was about 62uS which works-out to about 16kHz...  Which is 3 samples at 48kHz.

Since the stair-steps were clearly present, and the filtering wasn't doing anything...  all of the cycles and half-cycles were exact multiples of the sample rate.


* My digital 'scope has a GPIB connecter (and I have GPIB on my computers, but it's not hooked-up and I'd have to find the software install it, and figure out how to use it.  I don't even know if we have the GPIB interface software.  We bought it used.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #79 –
17k/high 16k here, not bad for the abuse my ears have been through over the years and dropping noticeably from 'excellent' during testing in my military entry days to 'downright horrible' now (things like catching half of what my wife says even when giving her my full attention and in close proximity)
Perhaps I should have done more than 'wear' my earplugs very loosely when working in those loud mainspaces and around whizbang pumps. 

interesting, those emoticons do not work when JS is disabled

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #80 –
18kHz at 22 years old.  I think I've been to a total of two live concerts in my life, and I really can't think of anywhere else I would've experienced prolonged exposure to unhealthily loud noises.  Interesting just how quickly you can lose that section of your hearing without even doing anything bad to them.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #81 –
I think you're doing OK, Mickey.

I've selectively chosen the results from this thread that best "fit the curve" to make the simple table below and you seem to be about average.



PS I realise that this table represents the results from a non-scientific test, so please don't flame me.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #82 –
i'm 24 and i can hear 22k when i crank the volume.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #83 –
DVDdoug,

I think we need to get to the bottom of what you are seeing, because it doesn't make any sense. A 17 kHz signal is very close to the lowpass cutoff frequency of your soundcard, and as such it must necessarily be a near-perfect sine wave, because any distortion at all would imply the presence of frequencies well above the cutoff frequency.

Is it possible that your soundcard is resampling (poorly) your signal and introducing beat frequencies, which would explain fluctuations in amplitude and period? Unfortunately this would not explain stair-steps in the waveform, which, as I said above, should not be possible because of the lowpass.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #84 –
Sorry for going so-far off-topic, but I'm still thinking about this....

BTW - When I did my single-frequency 17kHz experiment with my lousy soundcard and cheap speakers, I was hearing sub-harmonics... Maybe the tweeters rattling/resonating.    I don't know if I can hear 17kHz, but I was hearing something way below that! 

Quote from: Raiden on
Quote from: DVDdoug on
The sample-points don't "line up" with where the positive/negative peaks need to be.

Who said you'd have to do that?
[a href="http://imageshack.us" target="_blank"] And, when I did the experiment above, I did get a ship-load of amplitude jitter...  The peak-levels were jumping all over the place.

I just mentioned the "peaks", because it's easy to visualize what you're missing.  Once you've sampled, you don't know where (in time) the peak was, or its amplitude.  It's not just the peaks that are lost...  A digital audio file doesn't contain any information between the samples.  The ADC never even "looked at" the data between the samples!  If you "pretend you are a DAC" and "connect the dots", and add some smoothing (filtering), you don't get the original waveform.

Note that DACs, don't directly connect the dots...  The DAC will hold each value 'till the next sample.  So you get rectangular steps, with vertical & horizontal lines (before filtering), rather than triangular or angled lines.  I use GoldWave, and when you zoom-in it shows the waveform as rectangular steps.  But, this is choice made by the program developer.  The "real data" is just a series of sample points (i.e. "dots" on a graph).

Now, it turns-out that the only pure sine wave that will exactly fit those "dots" is the original sine wave, and higher alias frequencies.  But, my soundcard is't that smart, and most of my files aren't pure sine waves anyway.  So, who knows...  Maybe the original audio "looked" more like the "connect-the-dot" result, than a pure sine wave.    All we know is that the original waveform passed-through those data points, and we know that there is nothing "complicated" between the sample-points, because the original waveform was (hopefully) low-pass filtered before sampling.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #85 –
Quote from: DVDdoug on
If you "pretend you are a DAC" and "connect the dots", and add some smoothing (filtering), you don't get the original waveform.


Please re-read my reply to your post.  You do not understand how a DAC works nor how PCM works.  Please stop posting this nonsense.

See: http://www.dspguide.com/ch3/2.htm.  It actually has an example almost exactly like Raiden's screenshot. 
From the text:
Code: [Select]
[T]he situation is made more difficult by increasing the sine wave's frequency to 0.31 of the sampling rate. This results in only 3.2 samples per sine wave cycle. Here the samples are so sparse that they don't even appear to follow the general trend of the analog signal. Do these samples properly represent the analog waveform? Again, the answer is yes, and for exactly the same reason. The samples are a unique representation of the analog signal. All of the information needed to reconstruct the continuous waveform is contained in the digital data.  Obviously, it must be more sophisticated than just drawing straight lines between the data points. As strange as it seems, this is proper sampling according to our definition.


Quote
All we know is that the original waveform passed-through those data points

The PCM samples are not voltage values that the original waveform passed through.  They are impulses that allow the DAC to reproduce the original waveform.  The PCM samples are taken after the Sample-and-Hold circuit and an anti-alias circuit and are not necessarily identical to the original waveform.  They just happen to match closely when you're looking at waveforms much lower than Nyquist.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #86 –
Just a word of warning, don't crank up the volume on freqs you can't hear.  Just because you can't hear it doesn't mean high energy waves aren't hitting your eardrums.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #87 –
Quote from: Synthetic Soul on
With Benski's I started hearing a tone after he said 20K and just before he said 19K.
...
I am 38, listening on headphones.
Just tested with different headphones on my laptop at home and this time it was 16K. 

I'm assuming that level is more likely (given that I used to play the drums and have listened to personal stereos way too loud for around 20 years), but this difference caused by hardware is frustrating.
I'm on a horse.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #88 –
It is frustrating.  I grabbed a microphone and recorded the output from my speakers.  Sure enough, they could reproduce all the frequencies.  The response was far from flat, but my setup was crude.  There was still plenty of energy present in the frequencies I could not hear, so I know that the equipment isn't influencing my results.

I remember doing similar tests in my late 20s and being able to hear closer to 18kHz.  I'm not concerned with what is normal high frequency loss and I feel pretty good that I haven't lost all that much.  What I do find annoying is that I have constant ringing in my ears at a very high frequency (~16+kHz?).  Just guessing, but I think I can hear it over a background level of 60 perhaps 70 dB.  Listening to these test tones doesn't help any either.

@DVDdoug
You should familiarize yourself with the impulse response of a low pass filter.  It would seem that you've had no formal training in signals and transforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinc_function

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #89 –
Quote from: Bugs.Bunny on
Quote from: Martel on

Have you thought about what actually happens when two applications each simultaneously play sounds with different sample rates? The driver/OS/card then HAS TO resample for obvious reasons.

That's true, in this case it has to (multiple sounds with different samplerates played through the same channels).

And how can you be so sure that the waveform doesn't get resampled no matter what (even when a single waveform is playing)? You cannot - unless you know the exact workings of the API/OS mixer/device driver/soundcard.
Perhaps your soundcard/its driver sets the samplerate between the chip and DAC to that of the sound played first and adjusts every other sound playing simultaneously to this chosen rate. Or perhaps it just resamples everything to some fixed internal rate (and it could get worse if it resampled even the sounds that already match the internal rate!). Pair this with a lame (reckless) resampling algorithm and you get some nasty aliasing artifacts. At least some people can tell these from the actual tone.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #90 –
Uhhh, just below 20k and I'm 20 years old. Sounding good. ^^
Surprised a bit 'cause I always listen my music loud as hell  but maybe it's just good practice.
Sennheiser HD595 - Logitech Z5500 - SB XFi Xtreme Audio
FLAC -8

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #91 –
Quote from: Slipstreem on
I think you're doing OK, Mickey.

I've selectively chosen the results from this thread that best "fit the curve" to make the simple table below and you seem to be about average.

Yep I made a similar table and plot. I did this a few days ago when there ware only 45 replies, so this doesn't contain all the data. It does however contain all the data points (up to reply 45)  for which the respondent gave their age.

As you can see the data shows a pretty consistent pattern. Apart from just a few outliers the data is quite well clustered. My effort is also not particularly scientific, I put that approximate "line of best fit" in by hand. It seems to show typical frequency limit of about 19Khz by late teens, falling by about 1.5 kHz per decade down to about 12kHz at about 65 years old. So even though this test is crude, that data agrees pretty well with just about everything I’ve ever read about human hearing.

Take a look at the graph here :

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #92 –
Quote from: SaunaChum on
...but maybe it's just good practice.

Genetics play a big role too.

Quote from: lesswire on
I had a hearing test with a doctor about 3 years ago and he told me my hearing was very healthy...well maybe it's no longer.

AFAIK they only test it from 125 (or was it 250?) Hz to 8kHz, as that's all you need to clearly understant speech

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #93 –
Quote from: lesswire on
Between 16 and 17 Khz. I'm almost 28. I guess this is the result of too much loud metal.



I guess this test may be biased depending on the sound card, earphones etc...I had a hearing test with a doctor about 3 years ago and he told me my hearing was very healthy...well maybe it's no longer.


As jmartis said the Doctor possibly didn't even test the very high end. And even if he did you have to understand that the last thing a doctor wants to do is to unneccessarily alarm or stress-out a patient. As such they generally have fairly broad "normal ranges" for things like this. I think it very likely that if the doctor did test you right up to 20kHz that you'd still be very safely within your doctors "normal range".

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #94 –
only 16k @ 35 years  (with Benski's 48kHz-Resample - the 44,1k-sample was faulty)

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #95 –
Quote from: greynol on
It is frustrating.  I grabbed a microphone and recorded the output from my speakers.  Sure enough, they could reproduce all the frequencies.  The response was far from flat, but my setup was crude.  There was still plenty of energy present in the frequencies I could not hear, so I know that the equipment isn't influencing my results.


Yeah I definitely wouldn't trust the accuracy of this test in the over 20kHz frequency range. My sound cards response is pretty flat up to 20kHz but I observed a noticeable drop off above that (even when resampling to 48kHz). Personally I don't think that results above 20k are really that important to the average person.

PS. When I looked at the actual voltage out of my sound-card (as per my earlier post) I noticed the signal was down about 8dB at the start of the wave (22kHz), climbing to about -1dB at 20KHz. As for my speaker/headphone frequency response, that's anyone's guess.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #96 –
Quote from: uart on
As for my speaker/headphone frequency response, that's anyone's guess.
Yep. Gotta love those ambiguous specs the manufacturers hand out for headphones! My Sennheiser HD447s are specced from 25Hz to 21kHz. There's no clue as to how many dB down they are at those points though. I could assume those were the -3dB points, but I have no way of knowing.

Cheers, Slipstreem. 

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #97 –
18Khz for me, im 33.  I could somehow tell the difference a little earlier on the 44.1KHz sample than on the 48 one. Using speakers with quite a bit of ambient noise. Having worked about 10 years as a DJ and a lot of shooting in the army doesnt seem to have made its presence felt too much at least.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #98 –
15kHz, right ear; 17kHz on the left. Sort of. The very high frequencies kind of break up in my left ear, like a failing tweeter. Very annoying.  I know this through professional hearing analysis.... Late 30s. Lifelong musician and former PA/HiFi level abuser. Now I'm a walking, talking low-pass filter. If this keeps up, soon I won't even have to bother looking at Hydrogen Audio, unless I feel like reading about what those still blessed with the gift of aural reception are up to.

Seriously, though, I hope you youngsters don't make the same stupid mistakes I made when I was younger. My hearing deficiency is entirely self-inflicted, unfortunately. Believe me, you don't want diminished hearing long before you're old and grey. This is easily preventable, so please do take care.

Simple Hearing Test

Reply #99 –
17khz here at aprox. an age of thirty. Though, HF cutoff isn't my main problem. I am too sensitive to sounds inside of my hearing range, espacially 10-13khz. I can notice sounds as low as 30hz, even at low levels.... partially because i do not just "hear" with my ears. In public transports for example, i can notice how the speech from the speakers makes stuff vibrate. People frequently ask me why i'm talking so quietly, when to me, it seems as if i'm just talking at an for me comfortable level - on the other hand, i frequently asks others to speak a bit quieter. No, i have no interest in training this ability further by participating in audio DBTs :)
I am arrogant and I can afford it because I deliver.