How High Can You Hear?

[AudioDoctor]

Well, up to 8,000 ft ASL I am ok, but much higher and I start getting a bit woozy, almost drunk feeling. Above 10,000 ft ASL and I can hear things and see things that aren't even there...

 

If I make it up to 15,000 ft, I probably won't be hearing much of anything for long as the HAPE and HACE set in and I eventually die.

 

SO safely I can hear up to 8,000 ft. No higher without special audiophile approved oxygen systems...

 

[wgscott]

It's a common experience that older cardiologists can hear heart murmurs that are inaudible to (young) medical trainees, until those trainees gain experience.

 

That is only relevant to the first 45 seconds of the Dark Side of the Moon.

[mwheelerk]

From a similar online test on another forum 12,000 @ 63 (years)

[PewterTA]

Last time I had it checked (a year or so ago) I was able to get to right around 18K consistently, 19KHz dropped to 50/50 and 20KHz was about 15% of the time. Anything above 18K though I couldn't "hear" it was more an un-comfortableness that I felt and would mark off that I was hearing something. Like ants crawling over you sort of a thing.

 

The other trouble I really have is the slight tinnitus/sinus pressure that I had trouble with separating as to what I was experiencing.

 

So not too bad at 36, but I have (except for a concert or two), basically tried my hardest to avoid club, concerts and what not without hearing protection (it actually hurts me to go to anything loud). Like physical pain and headaches hurt.

[AudioDoctor]

Well, up to 8,000 ft ASL I am ok, but much higher and I start getting a bit woozy, almost drunk feeling. Above 10,000 ft ASL and I can hear things and see things that aren't even there...

 

If I make it up to 15,000 ft, I probably won't be hearing much of anything for long as the HAPE and HACE set in and I eventually die.

 

SO safely I can hear up to 8,000 ft. No higher without special audiophile approved oxygen systems...

 

 

I thought it was funny...

[esldude]

Last time I had it checked (a year or so ago) I was able to get to right around 18K consistently, 19KHz dropped to 50/50 and 20KHz was about 15% of the time. Anything above 18K though I couldn't "hear" it was more an un-comfortableness that I felt and would mark off that I was hearing something. Like ants crawling over you sort of a thing.

 

The other trouble I really have is the slight tinnitus/sinus pressure that I had trouble with separating as to what I was experiencing.

 

So not too bad at 36, but I have (except for a concert or two), basically tried my hardest to avoid club, concerts and what not without hearing protection (it actually hurts me to go to anything loud). Like physical pain and headaches hurt.

 

Oh the highest reported numbers yet in kilohertz at least. Maybe you should be the forum's designated high sample rate, variable filter audibility tester. Let us old dudes know what is happening a half octave beyond what we can hear.

[PopPop]

I thought it was funny...

 

So did I FWIW, I no more than thought of it and there you laid it down.

[Panelhead]

Had mine checked at Costco about 10 years ago. Was about 15k in each ear. Told me I do not need a hearing aid.

My wife has been saying I need a hearing aid for 20 years. Definitely have lost some hearing ability after about 55 years of age.

There is not much up there above 10k in music. At least not in what I listen to.

[AudioDoctor]

So did I FWIW, I no more than thought of it and there you laid it down.

 

Must be a Minnesotan thing.

[Allan F]

Well, up to 8,000 ft ASL I am ok, but much higher and I start getting a bit woozy, almost drunk feeling. Above 10,000 ft ASL and I can hear things and see things that aren't even there...

 

If I make it up to 15,000 ft, I probably won't be hearing much of anything for long as the HAPE and HACE set in and I eventually die.

 

SO safely I can hear up to 8,000 ft. No higher without special audiophile approved oxygen systems...

 

 

I'm surprised that no one has posted describing their hearing in terms of the number of joints they had smoked.

[gmgraves]

My wife's voice (as well as a lot of female voices) fall within the frequency of sound I have difficulty hearing. Sometimes this isn't a bad thing but it caused enough problems at home and professionally that I ended up getting fitted for hearing aids. I was worried they would degrade my listening experience as described above. I worked with my audiologist tuning the aids over several weeks and was pleasantly surprised that they actually enhanced my listening experience for most music. My system, however, is fairly modest and not as revealing as some members' systems. I would be interested in listening to a nice system to compare the sound with and without the aids.

 

Well, my friend did say that he was scheduled to go back to his audiologist several more times to get everything tuned to his hearing, so maybe there's hope for him yet. He's pretty despondent about the whole thing right now, though. Thanks for relating your experience, I pass it along to him. Might make feel better about the entire thing.

[crisnee]

Nothing at all to do with expectation bias.

 

I can hear the difference between an 128k mp3 and Redbook. I have acquantainces who've said they sound the same. Yet when I point out the differences to them and play a few examples they start to notice the differnces - consistently and under blind conditions. The differences were always there, but until they were told what to listen for, they didn't notice them. It's not imaginary, it's just that they learned to notice the differences they didn't hear before.

 

So yes, listening is a learned, trained skill. Not the same as hearing, the physiological phenomenon.

 

I'm not sure if you're correct here. It's complicated.

 

Ideally hearing, the physiological phenomenon, includes hearing all things including the "faults" of 128k mp3 sound. You claim the uneducated listener hears the faults (if they exist) but he doesn't recognize that he does. So the question is, when you endeavor to educate, when you describe what the listener should hear (the faults), are you creating "expectation bias" in him, the same bias you would have succumbed to at an earlier date to make all this possible.

 

I'm not saying this is so, just a hypothetical case and a reason why it might be expectation bias.

 

Chris

[crisnee]

12 khz, I think.

 

Through headphones I could easily hear 12 khz, but not the next level which is 15 khz. Then I listened to my speakers, nada. Not a bit, even when I turned up the volume. WTF?

 

So I pulled out my trusty Stereophile test cd rip. 12.5 khz on the speakers. No problem. So what gives?

 

Chris

[esldude]

12 khz, I think.

 

Through headphones I could easily hear 12 khz, but not the next level which is 15 khz. Then I listened to my speakers, nada. Not a bit, even when I turned up the volume. WTF?

 

So I pulled out my trusty Stereophile test cd rip. 12.5 khz on the speakers. No problem. So what gives?

 

Chris

 

Maybe this is a better test. Lets you set thresholds at different frequencies.

 

Equal loudness contours and audiometry - Test your own hearing

[mav52]

12 khz, I think.

 

Through headphones I could easily hear 12 khz, but not the next level which is 15 khz. Then I listened to my speakers, nada. Not a bit, even when I turned up the volume. WTF?

 

So I pulled out my trusty Stereophile test cd rip. 12.5 khz on the speakers. No problem. So what gives?

 

Chris

 

Same as you, dead stop at 12.5, tested by a board-certified Otolaryngologists or in laymen terms, ENT doctor.

[crisnee]

I'm not sure if you're correct here. It's complicated.

 

Ideally hearing, the physiological phenomenon, includes hearing all things including the "faults" of 128k mp3 sound. You claim the uneducated listener hears the faults (if they exist) but he doesn't recognize that he does. So the question is, when you endeavor to educate, when you describe what the listener should hear (the faults), are you creating "expectation bias" in him, the same bias you would have succumbed to at an earlier date to make all this possible.

 

I'm not saying this is so, just a hypothetical case and a reason why it might be expectation bias.

 

Chris

 

I was brain dead when I made this reply. I neglected to notice that the educated listener could now identify the mp3 files under blind conditions--I'll assume double blind or close enough to it. So expectation bias indeed would NOT have been a factor as far as I can see.

 

Chris

[Jud]

Standard redbook CDs go to 22K, it seem that everyone falls far short of that. So much for all the hi rez nonsense.

 

Or rather, so much for all the nonsense that hi res is about hearing frequencies up to 100kHz. Whether hi res is better (assuming equal recordings, which is almost never the case anyway) has far more to do with the filtering used in digital audio. To oversimplify, are the oversampling filters used by recording studios (or lack of a downsampling filter) better than the oversampling filters in your DAC chip? Usually the answer is yes.

[mayhem13]

Or rather, so much for all the nonsense that hi res is about hearing frequencies up to 100kHz. Whether hi res is better (assuming equal recordings, which is almost never the case anyway) has far more to do with the filtering used in digital audio. To oversimplify, are the oversampling filters used by recording studios (or lack of a downsampling filter) better than the oversampling filters in your DAC chip? Usually the answer is yes.

 

Agreed.......for which some in the commercial side of audio are responsible by providing response figures that include 30,49 even 50khz ( speaker mfgrs in particular) HiRes is just what it means, HI RESOLUTION across the entire pass band.

 

With that, I'd add a need to consider what we middle aged men are capable of hearing across the board. While these cutoff freq tests might surprise some, the fact is that our hearing response is like a bell curve being most acute between 800hz and 4khz or so....looking near flat if we were to graph it. But then it tilts downwards on both ends. So for those that can't hear above 15khz, be sure that the acuity below the cutoff is affected as well, all the way down to the vocal range where speech intelligibility becomes effected as well.

 

As we say in speaker building camps, it's all about the midrange!

[firedog]

I'm not sure if you're correct here. It's complicated.

 

Ideally hearing, the physiological phenomenon, includes hearing all things including the "faults" of 128k mp3 sound. You claim the uneducated listener hears the faults (if they exist) but he doesn't recognize that he does. So the question is, when you endeavor to educate, when you describe what the listener should hear (the faults), are you creating "expectation bias" in him, the same bias you would have succumbed to at an earlier date to make all this possible.

 

I'm not saying this is so, just a hypothetical case and a reason why it might be expectation bias.

 

Chris

 

I know Chris backed off this quote, but in general I'm not really sure why this is a difficult concept.

 

There are lots of examples of this in many fields. Snowmonkey mentioned an audio based one he has familiarity with in medical training. With art/paintings I've certainly found it true - when you educate yourself you "see" things that a non-educated viewer doesn't notice. It's not that they aren't there, it's just the non educated don't notice all sorts of detail that they "see".

 

I used to be a farmer. Believe me, I could look at my crops and immediately see all sorts of things that "ordinary" people "didn't see" - they could only see them after they were pointed out. They were there, but the uneducated didn't notice them.

 

"Identical twins"- when you know them well you can see the differences. When you don't, you can't. Why? Because you train your brain to notice the small differences between them that most people don't notice and therefore say they "can't see the difference" between them and can't tell them apart.

 

Do any of you honestly think that any two people "see" something different when looking at the twins? No, it's just that some individuals learn to notice the differences between them. Often all it takes is for someone to point out a couple of differences and you don't have any trouble telling the twins apart afterwards. Yet until the difference is pointed out you might have seen the twins dozens of times and never noticed them. Do any of you seriously want to tell me that seeing this difference is due to "expectation bias"? No, it's just a type of "trained" vision.

 

Nothing different about audio. When you train your brain to notice certain types of detail or certain sounds, you can hear them afterwards, whether you are expecting them or not. It has nothing to do with expectation bias. People who haven't trained their listening skills can "hear" these sounds, but don't notice them, so in actual experience they "don't hear" them.

[AudioDoctor]

I'm surprised that no one has posted describing their hearing in terms of the number of joints they had smoked.

 

I thought of that, but decided that because I have no experience with that I would let someone else post it...

[Jud]

I know Chris backed off this quote, but in general I'm not really sure why this is a difficult concept.

 

There are lots of examples of this in many fields. Snowmonkey mentioned an audio based one he has familiarity with in medical training. With art/paintings I've certainly found it true - when you educate yourself you "see" things that a non-educated viewer doesn't notice. It's not that they aren't there, it's just the non educated don't notice all sorts of detail that they "see".

 

I used to be a farmer. Believe me, I could look at my crops and immediately see all sorts of things that "ordinary" people "didn't see" - they could only see them after they were pointed out. They were there, but the uneducated didn't notice them.

 

"Identical twins"- when you know them well you can see the differences. When you don't, you can't. Why? Because you train your brain to notice the small differences between them that most people don't notice and therefore say they "can't see the difference" between them and can't tell them apart.

 

Do any of you honestly think that any two people "see" something different when looking at the twins? No, it's just that some individuals learn to notice the differences between them. Often all it takes is for someone to point out a couple of differences and you don't have any trouble telling the twins apart afterwards. Yet until the difference is pointed out you might have seen the twins dozens of times and never noticed them. Do any of you seriously want to tell me that seeing this difference is due to "expectation bias"? No, it's just a type of "trained" vision.

 

Nothing different about audio. When you train your brain to notice certain types of detail or certain sounds, you can hear them afterwards, whether you are expecting them or not. It has nothing to do with expectation bias. People who haven't trained their listening skills can "hear" these sounds, but don't notice them, so in actual experience they "don't hear" them.

 

I agree with everything you've said about training and experience making it much easier to notice specific things. But in terms of how this affects listening to music, that's where in my humble opinion it gets more complicated. For designers and developers who may be aiming to improve specific aspects of their equipment or software, it seems to me that noticing specifics is fine. But what about for you and me, the average listener? I think emphasis on a specific aspect of the sound - soundstage, bass extension, whatever - can be very much to the detriment of both (1) enjoying the music, and (2) letting yourself hear how well the overall sound reproduces reality. It goes back to what I said before - if you're listening to Pavarotti live, you're not thinking about soundstage or bass extension, so if you want to know how well your audio system reproduces Pavarotti, you shouldn't be concentrating on those things when you're listening at home.

[Allan F]

Standard redbook CDs go to 22K, it seem that everyone falls far short of that. So much for all the hi rez nonsense.

 

What has that got anything to do with hi rez? Resolution is a totally different concept related to bit depth and sampling frequency. You can hear differences in sound quality regardless of whether you can hear above 12kHz, a level where there is very little musical content in any case.

[AudioDoctor]

I took the "test" and was able to hear up to 16khz.

 

A question, is everyone sure that the equipment they are using has a flat EQ?

[wgscott]

I took the "test" and was able to hear up to 16khz.

 

A question, is everyone sure that the equipment they are using has a flat EQ?

 

What? That is audiophile impurity!

 

(My positive control is my kids come out of the other room and complain about 20kHz test tones I can't hear).

[NOMBEDES]

I think my tinnitus runs at a constant 18000 Hz.