HydrogenAudio

Hydrogenaudio Forum => General Audio => Topic started by: IgorC on 2012-02-24 00:33:05

Poll
Question: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear (at normal loudness level)?
Option 1: 8 kHz votes: 1
Option 2: 10 kHz votes: 2
Option 3: 12 kHz votes: 11
Option 4: 14 kHz votes: 7
Option 5: 15 kHz votes: 17
Option 6: 16 kHz votes: 18
Option 7: 17 kHz votes: 27
Option 8: 18 kHz votes: 13
Option 9: 19 kHz votes: 5
Option 10: 20 kHz and higher votes: 12
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-24 00:33:05
It will be interesing to see hearing abilities of Hydrogenaudio's members.

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-yo...s-hearing-test/ (http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-you-hear-this-hearing-test/)

Please perform the test on your normal loudness levels.

Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: marc2003 on 2012-02-24 00:48:40
just 12kHz here. 35 years old. 
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: eahm on 2012-02-24 01:25:06
just 12kHz here. 35 years old. 

I can ensure you I hear better than anyone I know and I can hear only up to 12kHz like you...I'll be 30 in 5 days
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Batman321 on 2012-02-24 01:48:53
17 KHz here.

35 Years old.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: kraut on 2012-02-24 03:11:27
via earphones 15kHz, 62 years.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-24 03:35:16
As headphones  genereally are more revealing, I'd think people who use them will report higher frequencies.

29 y.o. here and 16 kHz (voted) on a normal volume. Increasing the volume helped to actually more feel than hear 17 kHz in my case.
Cranking the volume even more leads to some noises on 17 kHz and high frequencies files. What I hear  isn't  actually an indicated frequenices (17... 22 kHz) but some alien noises (besides of the obvious clicking at the begining and in the end of the files)
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Xrcr9709 on 2012-02-24 03:44:08
I hear up to 15kHz, I "guess" a sound at 16 and 17 kHz. (30 years old)
So I chekced 15kHz
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: sizetwo on 2012-02-24 06:49:15
17 khz, 36 year old using speakers.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Kujibo on 2012-02-24 07:16:37
As headphones  genereally are more revealing, I'd think people who use them will report higher frequencies.

29 y.o. here and 16 kHz (voted) on a normal volume. Increasing the volume helped to actually more feel than hear 17 kHz in my case.
Cranking the volume even more leads to some noises on 17 kHz and high frequencies files. What I hear  isn't  actually an indicated frequenices (17... 22 kHz) but some alien noises (besides of the obvious clicking at the begining and in the end of the files)


I first did the test with decent 3 way speakers and scored 14 kHz. However the thought that perhaps my speakers might not be up to the higher frequencies I tried with a decent pair of closed back headphones to see if something different would result. With the headphones I score up to 18 kHz, though things still roll off pretty quick after 14 kHz. The closed back headphones make a huge difference in blocking out all the normal whine that goes on around me and helps a lot. So yes, I think there is going to be a large difference given the listening environment.

With the web test things start to sound a bit funky at the high frequencies though, 18 kHz sounds a bit strange, almost sounds like something might be folding back down into the lower frequencies so I gotta wonder about the test/equipment. Or maybe that's how ears perceive something on the threshold of audibility. Honestly I'm not sure how the highest frequencies really should be perceived, maybe the highest frequencies might naturally present with less energy? I actually "feel" something for 19 through 22 kHz, meaning I can tell there is a difference between on and off but I can't make out any tone, I wonder if it's just the energy presenting itself given the closed back headphones. At 22 kHz I feel nothing though.

Actually the slightly odd web results made me wonder so I just fired up Audacity and generated a bunch of 96 kHz sine waves with fade ins (to avoid the clicks so I can really tell between off and on). This is driving my onboard DAC at 96 kHz. I get different results from this web test. Interestingly I can hear sines fairly well up to 16500 Hz, then at 16600 Hz I can't hear anything. It's a very steep drop off in between those two frequencies. I don't perceive any of the folding back down to lower frequencies or weirdness I get with the web test, I can't hear anything after my cutoff at all and it all sounds as expected up to the cutoff.

So I have to wonder about the quality of that web test or how it ends up driving the DAC. My gut feeling is that the sine waves are recorded at some frequency that isn't going to match up to the DAC rate and we'll be hearing aliasing that is ever so easy to notice on sine waves from whatever resampling algorithm our audio stack/hardware is performing, and it's going to be different on each users system too. The test is all flash based so who knows what is going on in there.

41 here.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: onkl on 2012-02-24 07:48:55
I had to record the output just to check if there's actually something playing. The rolloff after 17khz is extremely steep and I could only hear 18khz because I knew something was there. I'm 27.

I guess the flash player > browser > windows mixer chain is not so well suited for this test.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: halb27 on 2012-02-24 09:08:15
'folding back down to lower frequencies' phenomen here too with my environment. That's why I think we shouldn't pay too much attention to this experiment.

Another thing that came to my mind. Formerly I thought things for us aging people is as this experiments suggests: From the age of 20 or so we're starting to loose our ability to hear extremely high frequencies. Some day however I read that's not totally correct. One point is that people's fading abilities in this respect do vary a lot. It's not rare that rather old people aren't bad at all in hearing high frequencies.  On the other hand the focus is too much on extremely high frequencies whereas for many people decreasing hearing abilities start at a few kHz which is much more relevant.

@Kujibo: do you mind sharing your test files with us?
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: dhromed on 2012-02-24 09:18:19
30 years. ~17.2KHz using a 16-18KHz sweep in foobar2000, through 6 year old Sennheiser HD555 Headphones.

Basically played the sweep both ways, and hit pause as soon as I couldn't hear anything anymore / began hearing something. Rolloff is very smooth.

I am uncertain whether this is a limitation of my ears or of my audio pipeline, but most certain is that in real music, anything over 16Khz is completely drowned out by the lower content. I'll do the actual test linked above some time later.

There's an interesting track by Autechre which contains an incredibly powerful continuous sound meandering around 18Khz. It' clearly visible in the spectrograph. It has a crazy multi-band run-in and run-out, and I can hear those, but the actual whine is entirely missing. I suppose they put it in to scare off children and people with healthy ears.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: skamp on 2012-02-24 10:26:45
I'm almost 30 years old, and I could hear all the tones up to 17kHz included clear as day with headphones at normal volume. I could barely hear the 18kHz tone however.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Arnold B. Krueger on 2012-02-24 12:28:11
30 years. ~17.2KHz using a 16-18KHz sweep in foobar2000, through 6 year old Sennheiser HD555 Headphones.


Listening tests involving frequency sweeps are not representative of how we hear high frequencies in most music. Music is generally not composed of pure tones, but fundamental notes and their harmonics.  Many musical notes that are played on musical instruments have the same fundamental frequency and/or low harmonics (which the ear can confuse). We identify music as being produced by certain instruments by the harmonic content and the shaping of the amplitude envelope of the notes.

Typically, it is masking of upper harmonics that controls our ability to hear their presence or absence.

There is very limited transfer of knowledge about how you hear high frequency pure tones to how you hear the effects of brick wall filters.

People use things like the sheen and air of musical instruments like cymbals as mental references for estimating the high frequency bandpass of audio systems. How many reviews have you read that included comments about the reproduction of sounds like brushed cymbals?  However, brushed cymbals are not necessarily the best musical instruments to listen to to see if you can hear the effects of a brick wall filter at 16 KHz.

Quote
There's an interesting track by Autechre which contains an incredibly powerful continuous sound meandering around 18Khz. It' clearly visible in the spectrograph. It has a crazy multi-band run-in and run-out, and I can hear those, but the actual whine is entirely missing. I suppose they put it in to scare off children and people with healthy ears.


That is of course very, very atypical.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: C.R.Helmrich on 2012-02-24 12:42:10
If you are running Windows 7 (or Vista probably), I highly recommend reading this post (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=77994&view=findpost&p=693667) before doing the test.

With the wrong settings (i.e. triggering Windows' terrible resampler), I could detect even the 21-kHz tone because I could hear lower-frequency distortion tones.

Chris
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: dhromed on 2012-02-24 13:17:51
Listening tests involving frequency sweeps are not representative of how we hear high frequencies in most music. Music is generally not composed of pure tones, but fundamental notes and their harmonics.


Hence my comment about real music.

It is absolutely necessary to test real-world claims with real-world music, but there's no harm in establishing some hard upper bound. If you can't hear even a loud, pure tone above 18KHz, then redbook is defnitely enough for you.

In fact I did a small test with one original file and one downsampled to 32000Hz. I was unable to ABX those, though it was muddy rock with not much power in the far highs.


Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: pdq on 2012-02-24 13:32:02
Only up to 12 kHz (tested two years ago when I was 63).

Edit: I wish the results had been grouped by age range, so that we could plot the average loss vs. age.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Martel on 2012-02-24 14:42:05
This test is totally messed up under Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), Firefox 10 and Flash Player 11.0.1.152, the base tone is literally buried in aliasing artifacts. Interestingly enough, running Foobar 2000 under Winde does not produce anything like that.

I can hear 18kHz at age of 31 using the audiocheck.net sample and Sennheiser HD 215 headphones.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: LithosZA on 2012-02-24 14:54:44
Up to 18Khz in foobar2000 WASAPI output -> 16bit(dithering enabled).
Up to 17Khz in on http://www.noiseaddicts.com (http://www.noiseaddicts.com) with Firefox 9.0.1 and Flash Player 10.3.183.7 (I don't know if it is a problem with the tone or Flash Player's fault)

Used a pair of Sennheiser HD-280 Pros through a Total Bithead.
Edit: I am 27
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: zipr on 2012-02-24 15:21:05
Equipment and environment can make a big difference here, I'd imagine. I tried with two different pairs of headphones in a relatively (but not completely) quiet room. One pair of headphones, I could only hear to 14. With the other, I could get to 16 or 17.

42 years old here.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: kode54 on 2012-02-24 16:12:00
15KHz and 30 years old.

Also, be careful with not only your equipment, but any signal processing. For instance, I forgot to disable my X-Fi's CMSS 3D, and/or try the onboard sound without headphone virtualization, and also try them with speakers. With the X-Fi and CMSS 3D enabled, I was able to hear the 17KHz but not the 16KHz, which made no sense, until I turned up the volume and noticed that the 17KHz was emitting white noise.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: mjb2006 on 2012-02-24 17:10:50
With the web test things start to sound a bit funky at the high frequencies though, 18 kHz sounds a bit strange, almost sounds like something might be folding back down into the lower frequencies

...quite likely, if playing audio through a web browser on Windows:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en...a-47e51de9c3ae/ (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowspro-audiodevelopment/thread/725546ce-57bf-40d0-b7aa-47e51de9c3ae/)
(there's also an interesting tool mentioned in that thread which can be used to capture the actual signal going out to the DAC)

I suggest downloading the WAV clips from http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2010/10/hearing-loss-test/ (http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2010/10/hearing-loss-test/) and playing them directly in an audio player app. Even then, there's no guarantee against aliasing.  It's so hard to diagnose and resolve this kind of thing. It also means it's possible that people think they can hear the 18+ KHz tones, when in fact they are hearing aliased/"ghost" tones at lower frequencies.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Remedial Sound on 2012-02-24 18:05:26
There's an interesting track by Autechre which contains an incredibly powerful continuous sound meandering around 18Khz. It' clearly visible in the spectrograph. It has a crazy multi-band run-in and run-out, and I can hear those, but the actual whine is entirely missing. I suppose they put it in to scare off children and people with healthy ears.


Out of curiosity, which track?  I'm a big Autechre fan but have never heard (of) this.



Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: halb27 on 2012-02-24 18:12:04
16 kHz, age 62.
Thank you, mjb2006, for the link to the wav files.
16 kHz sounds clean now (using foobar), but 17 to 19 kHz sounds like a broad band noise in my environment. 20 kHz sounds like a lower frequency again.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: lvqcl on 2012-02-24 18:56:07
Out of curiosity, which track?  I'm a big Autechre fan but have never heard (of) this.

Second Bad Vilbel (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=81389&view=findpost&p=708235)?

There was 26-sec sample badvilbel.flac at http://www.ff123.net/samples.html (http://www.ff123.net/samples.html) but it seems that this site is no more.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: mjb2006 on 2012-02-24 19:40:17
16 kHz sounds clean now (using foobar), but 17 to 19 kHz sounds like a broad band noise in my environment. 20 kHz sounds like a lower frequency again.

You might try burning those WAVs to audio CD and playing it in a real CD player.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Kujibo on 2012-02-24 21:27:07
@Kujibo: do you mind sharing your test files with us?


I didn't save any, I was generating them on the fly and using binary deduction to narrow into my threshold, so they were fairly specific to my hearing range.

This should be pretty easy to do yourself with Audacity though:

- Make sure the project rate (found in bottom left corner) is set to what your audio hardware is set up to output (e.g. 48 or 96 kHz) to avoid resampling during playback.

- Menu: Track -> Add New -> Audio Track

- Menu: Generate -> Tone. Enter the frequency you want to create

- Give it a listen, try another rate.

- Get rid of the clicks by selecting first 100 milliseconds or so of the file, then with menu: Effect -> Fade In


I would think there must be some actual hearing test programs out there that can generate sines on the fly at the native output rate, I didn't bother looking.

Cheers

Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: halb27 on 2012-02-24 23:01:37
Thanks for the advice. I will do it.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: extrabigmehdi on 2012-02-25 00:02:40
18 khz, and almost 35 years old, so my ears are still "young"  .
I used my srh940 headphones.
I began the test from the highest frequency, and decreased it until I  was able to hear something.

Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Remedial Sound on 2012-02-25 02:11:53
Out of curiosity, which track?  I'm a big Autechre fan but have never heard (of) this.

Second Bad Vilbel (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=81389&view=findpost&p=708235)?

There was 26-sec sample badvilbel.flac at http://www.ff123.net/samples.html (http://www.ff123.net/samples.html) but it seems that this site is no more.


Ah, thanks, I vaguely recall this now, will give it a listen and see what I hear! 

I'm 35 and can still hear that TV signal frequency (~16 kHz), though my wife and many of my friends of  similar age can't.

Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: m45t3r on 2012-02-25 02:23:17
18kHZ with phones, 17kHz with speaker.


I'm 20 years old btw.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: robojock on 2012-02-25 05:31:08
17 kHz, age 33
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: extrabigmehdi on 2012-02-25 05:49:36
Hum I've redone the test with the speakers, and it's hard to hear the 18khz frequency, probably because of the surrounding noise (pc making some background noise) The closed headphone, helps by  isolating a bit.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: onkl on 2012-02-25 06:59:51
16 kHz sounds clean now (using foobar), but 17 to 19 kHz sounds like a broad band noise in my environment. 20 kHz sounds like a lower frequency again.

That's aliasing (http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_aliasing.php) coming from either your soundcard or windows mixer. Try using a software resampler in foobar to match the frequency your soundcard is set to.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: iGold on 2012-02-25 07:47:41
My hearing limit is 17kHz (37 years old), my wife - 18kHz (age 31) and my daughter - 21kHz (age 8). We used headphones and foobar2000 tone generator with 48kHz resampler.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Steve Forte Rio on 2012-02-25 11:13:43
Left ear - ~18 kHz, right ear - ~18.5 kHz (my own test on sine with increasing frequency). Your test: 18 kHz max.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: dhromed on 2012-02-25 13:36:23
Out of curiosity, which track?  I'm a big Autechre fan but have never heard (of) this.

Second Bad Vilbel (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=81389&view=findpost&p=708235)?

Ah, thanks, I vaguely recall this now, will give it a listen and see what I hear! 


Visual Analysis (http://pliv.com/things/autechre_18k.png).

[a href='index.php?showtopic=93686']Sample upload here[/a]

Edit
Oh, lvqcl linked to an old post of mine that I'd completely forgotten about. Heh.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Ed Seedhouse on 2012-02-25 14:45:10
Well, at age 68 I hear sounds right up to 15 khz, but they are almost certainly not not 15khz sounds.  Above about 10khz the sound begins to blend with my mild tinnitus and I can't tell where the actual cutoff is.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Intruder66 on 2012-02-25 15:38:43
15 kHz with (mid-quality) speakers at the age of 18, that is really bad I guess?
Maybe I'll re-do this test, I just listened to loud music five minutes ago.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: derty2 on 2012-02-25 15:57:09
I am over 40 years of age, I could hear all tones up to 20kHz (I could barely hear it but it was there). After 17kHz things were getting very very thin.

I was sitting in a small room with a fairly loud desktop computer creating constant ambient noise. I needed to raise the volume to a high enough level to hear over the computer.

My audio chain was going from PC line out (foobar2000 with kernel streaming, Windows XP with volume controls all at max), splitting to 2 separate integrated amplifiers, feeding two separate pairs of speakers (2+2 = 4 speaker stereo).
Rearfield (12 feet away) speaker pair is Fostex SM6600 studio monitors, and Nearfield (3 feet away) speaker pair is ATC SCM19 .

If I was listening to this test in a dead quiet room, with my audio gear, hearing 20 kHz would have been a piece of cake.

By the way... I also have this product in my media library: "ALAN PARSONS - SOUND CHECK 2 - AUDIO TEST & DEMONSTRATION CD",
and on this CD is a sequence of tracks named "PINK NOISE 1/3 OCTAVE SPECTRUM ANALYSIS" which go from 20 Hz all the way up to 20 kHz,
and i can hear all the tones.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: no404error on 2012-02-25 17:16:23
17/19kHz (speakers/headphones), 30 y/o.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: dhromed on 2012-02-25 17:51:52
15 kHz with (mid-quality) speakers at the age of 18, that is really bad I guess?
Maybe I'll re-do this test, I just listened to loud music five minutes ago.


Best conditions, I believe, are late in the evening after at least an hour of quietness.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: dhromed on 2012-02-25 17:54:47
Is it possible to produce some samples of intentionally aliased high-frequency tones, so people don't mistakenly believe they have super-hearing?
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: somemightsay on 2012-02-25 18:10:13
When I first ran the tests, I had the TV on a little loud and could only hear 12 kHz through my headphones at normal volume.
Hence, 12 kHz is what I selected for my poll result. I just tried again in a quiet environment with the same volume and same
headphones, and could hear 14 kHz. That made me feel a bit better.  44 yrs old.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: halb27 on 2012-02-25 23:58:07
I tried all the advices given here on my standard pc but without success. Noise is too strong in the extreme frequency range.
I switched over to my notebook, and the results were very different: no more noise and no obvious aliasing frequencies up to 18 kHz. These drop in at 19 and 20 kHz.
But: If I consider the 17 and 18 kHz to be played back correctly I am able to hear 17 and 18 kHz. Aged 62 I don't believe that.

So finally I took mjb2006's advice, created an audio cd and played it on a regular cd player. Now everything's clear: I hear 15 kHz not too badly, but my hearing stops at 16 kHz which I can hear though very weakly.

I am afraid my experience with pc equipment in this test carries over to other testers producing a big question mark to the test results. I guess the biggest problem is not obvious aliasing frequencies as I encountered them on my notebook.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-02-26 00:16:12
Is it possible to produce some samples of intentionally aliased high-frequency tones, so people don't mistakenly believe they have super-hearing?


Not really, they sound exactly like real high-frequency tones, just at a lower frequency. 

If you want to double check, you can either use foobar with a good resampler to your card's native sampling rate (if needed), or just record the tones and check in an audio editor if the frequencies changed.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: mudlord on 2012-02-26 00:16:26
22khz, 23 y/o

Sennheiser HD201
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: googlebot on 2012-02-26 00:25:18
Being synaesthetic the answer should be about 790 THz.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: millifoo on 2012-02-26 00:53:47

17khz on Sennheiser HD600's. I'm 46 years old, and have a loud ringing tinnitus at 11khz (which obscures a lot between 10khz - 13khz).

Some interesting things I noted:

I hear 15khz in my left ear only.  16khz in my right ear only. 17khz is back to center, but much quieter.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: FreaqyFrequency on 2012-02-26 02:42:50
17k, 20 years old.  I'm okay with this.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Emon on 2012-02-26 03:06:24
Tested myself using my EMU 1212m, the software has a signal generator. Could hear 20 KHz just fine at 26 years of age.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-02-26 03:59:12
22khz, 23 y/o

Sennheiser HD201


You might want to try repeating that with a 96kHz test tone (and a sound card that natively clocks at 96k).  I suspect that a lot of systems won't reproduce a 22kHz tone correctly at 44.1khz (IIRC flash runs at this).
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: itisljar on 2012-02-26 09:32:33
Somewhere between 16.5 and 17 kHz, 37 yrs old.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: [JAZ] on 2012-02-26 10:15:26
15Khz here. Looks like my hearing has worsened these last years.

Age: 32
System: Windows 7, integrated laptop sound (HD audio, codec ALC268), configured for 24bits 44Khz, 50% Volume, and Sony MDR-7505 closed headphones.
I hear 12Khz loud, 14Khz less loud, and 15Khz even less. At 16Khz could hear a wisper only if increasing the volume at 100%, so that does not count.

I used to hear up to 17Khz.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: C.R.Helmrich on 2012-02-26 11:20:29
Is it possible to produce some samples of intentionally aliased high-frequency tones, so people don't mistakenly believe they have super-hearing?


Not really, they sound exactly like real high-frequency tones, just at a lower frequency. 

If you want to double check, you can either use foobar with a good resampler to your card's native sampling rate (if needed), or just record the tones and check in an audio editor if the frequencies changed.

Or drown any aliasing tones in noise. Which is why I created the test file of this post (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=89487&view=findpost&p=782443). With that file I can hear up to 16 - 16.5 kHz (Sennheiser HD 590). With the files from the web site, see my earlier post.

Chris
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: randal1013 on 2012-02-26 11:49:31
i can definitely hear 17khz. 18 and up i hear *something* but im not sure if it's the frequency or other junk.


for those keeping track: 28 years old
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: 2012 on 2012-02-26 17:49:42
Had to download the files and upsample to 48000 (The sample rate OSS4 vmix is using).

I voted 16 although I think I heard something once at 17.

I'm in my late twenties.
Should I be worried?
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Reiginsei on 2012-02-26 18:06:22
I can't hear anything past 14 kHz.

But on heartest.exe from http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm (http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm) I can hear up to 16.5 kHz. So which one is correct?
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: greynol on 2012-02-26 18:15:24
I'm glad to see that I can still faintly hear 17kHz.  With higher frequencies I "feel" pressure and at the highest frequency I hear a faint buzzing tone which is clearly an artifact from my system.

I went back to generate a sweep at my card's native sample rate, and can hear just beyond 17kHz.  Anything higher than that disappears and I am not getting any sense of pressure.

Whether this pressure is placebo related or not, I can't be sure.  Pressing a button to hear a tone is hardly a double-blind process.  There are clicks when the samples start and stop which could probably be eliminated by creating ones that ramp up and down.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: RealityRipple on 2012-02-26 20:34:46
Plugged in some cheap Samsung earbuds, cranked my volume to maximum, and I could hear every tone. I'm 24. 19 and 20 started getting hard to hear as a solid tone, but I could still hear them as a... high pitched rumbling. And then 22 cleared up again and was audible. I'm sort of surprised given that I still have ringing in my ears from a concert I went to last May.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Kujibo on 2012-02-26 20:38:44
17khz on Sennheiser HD600's. I'm 46 years old, and have a loud ringing tinnitus at 11khz (which obscures a lot between 10khz - 13khz).


Dammit, now that you mentioned tinnitus I think I just self diagnosed myself as having it too. I've often heard a high pitch whine even when very young, I used to think it was just the TV thing or whatever, but now I always seem to hear a high pitch whine no matter where I am and I don't think it's just equipment causing it.

The sad and ridiculous thing is it didn't bother me at all before I started thinking about it yesterday, now it's driving me nuts as I know how to focus on it and I can't stop thinking about it. Maybe it's all placebo, but I have spent too much time playing in loud bands, so unfortunately probably not.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: AllanP on 2012-02-26 20:55:07
I can hear 19 KHz very strong and 20 KHz weak, my headphones frequency response is 20-20.000 Hz so maybe with other headphones I would hear the higher frequencies

I am 22 years old
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: greynol on 2012-02-26 20:57:07
'folding back down to lower frequencies' phenomen here too with my environment. That's why I think we shouldn't pay too much attention to this experiment.

I feel like this should be posted after every response so that people will think twice before posting their results.

There have been several "how high can you hear" discussions and this has always been a problem.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: extrabigmehdi on 2012-02-27 00:13:26
I  have done again the test , and this time perhaps at a higher volume,
and with a different headphone (hd25 1 II).
This time I've been able to hear the 21 khz frequency.
What's funny , it's that I  hear 21 khz more clearly than the 20 khz frequency (or I'm not even sure than I  hear 20 khz ).
I'm missing the logic of this.
I  think it's hard to get consistent results from this test, I'm not sure they are so meaningful.
And if you hear something as quite  weak, is that valid as "you hear that frequency" ?
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-02-27 00:16:40
What's funny , it's that I  hear 21 khz more clearly than the 20 khz frequency (or I'm not even sure than I  hear 20 khz ).
I'm missing the logic of this.
I  think it's hard to get consistent results from this test, I'm not sure they are so meaningful.
And if you hear something as quite  weak, is that valid as "you hear that frequency" ?


That is almost certainly aliasing.  Try again with foobar2000 and a good resampler, it'll probably go away.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: extrabigmehdi on 2012-02-27 00:43:12
What's funny , it's that I  hear 21 khz more clearly than the 20 khz frequency (or I'm not even sure than I  hear 20 khz ).
I'm missing the logic of this.
I  think it's hard to get consistent results from this test, I'm not sure they are so meaningful.
And if you hear something as quite  weak, is that valid as "you hear that frequency" ?


That is almost certainly aliasing.  Try again with foobar2000 and a good resampler, it'll probably go away.


Hum, I  don't expect this kind of problem with my expensive xonar stx.
But ok, I've generated two sine waves with soundforge , at 192 khz (theorically supported by my soundcard),
and I'm not just anymore sure of anything.
I  played them on foobar. I've boosted volume to max,  and noticed some random noise that are gone after some times .
Whatever ...
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-27 00:56:29
I've boosted volume to max,  and noticed some random noise that are gone after some times .
Whatever ...

Reading more carefully actually benefits understanding of the problem:

Quote
Which is the highest frequency that You can hear (at normal loudness level)?
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: christopher on 2012-02-27 00:59:14
This test is totally messed up under Linux (Ubuntu 8.04), Firefox 10 and Flash Player 11.0.1.152, the base tone is literally buried in aliasing artifacts. Interestingly enough, running Foobar 2000 under Winde does not produce anything like that.

I can hear 18kHz at age of 31 using the audiocheck.net sample and Sennheiser HD 215 headphones.



Up to 18Khz in foobar2000 WASAPI output -> 16bit(dithering enabled).
Up to 17Khz in on http://www.noiseaddicts.com (http://www.noiseaddicts.com) with Firefox 9.0.1 and Flash Player 10.3.183.7 (I don't know if it is a problem with the tone or Flash Player's fault)

Used a pair of Sennheiser HD-280 Pros through a Total Bithead.
Edit: I am 27



There are many potential problems when one attempts to play back audio which is pure sine, particularly high frequency content >17 kHz. I had to verify that the file was OK by downloading it; I think also my standard sound card (Audigy 2 running kX) which natively runs at 48 kHz and on-chip resamples to 44.1 was also introducing aliasing when playing in-browser.

I get undistorted bit perfect output in foobar with the PPHS resampler, and the MP3 as offered on the noiseaddicts site plays fine if I do so in foobar; anywhere else and it distorts). I also tested with Audacity at 48 kHz project rate and Cubase 5.5 with kX ASIO at 48 kHz. FWIW the older versions of Audition seemed to have problems generating pure sines above 16/17 kHz, couldn't figure out why at the time. (it wasn't a playback-distortion problem, directly burning the WAVs to a CD also resulting in aliasing on playback).

I used Audacity to generate my own tones to doublecheck my results: on my nearfield monitors in my fairly noisy room I can hear tones clearly to ~18 kHz. Not tested with my HD650s tonight - when I've tested in a quiet environment previously, playing back tones from both a PC and my H340, I could hear to about 19 kHz). I am 26 and a handful of months, my right inner ear was unfortunately damaged a few years ago when someone smacked me square on the ear with a flat palm (result: NIHL, tinnitus, hyperacusis etc, it's a bitch).


The only sure-fire way to check your hearing with sines is to generate them yourself in a trusted audio editor or DAW then play back on a system you've verified as not introducing additional distortion; I set up and checked foobar using the udial.ape test.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: extrabigmehdi on 2012-02-27 01:06:13
I've boosted volume to max,  and noticed some random noise that are gone after some times .
Whatever ...

Reading more carefully actually benefits understanding of the problem:

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




I  know, but I  wanted to see if it makes a difference. The test I've done on browser were at normal level. I  was confused with the different results I  got with my generated sinewaves (nothing to hear) , so I  boosted the volume.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-27 01:18:25
Also a simple analysis can be applied.  And some people actually have applied it.  And Thank them very much for that (for understanding).

Listen 12 kHz then listen 14 khz. Notice and remeber how a single tone actually sounds and how it differentiates with each increment of frequency.  A single tone is a monotone (it´s  not rumbling). If You notice odd decreasing of the pitch while you actually go to higher frequencies  then it's simply not a pure tone with indicated frequency.

Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-02-27 01:26:36
I  know, but I  wanted to see if it makes a difference. The test I've done on browser were at normal level. I  was confused with the different results I  got with my generated sinewaves (nothing to hear) , so I  boosted the volume.


The results you got in the browser are just aliasing, so they're not real.  When you played something in foobar2000 at a higher sampling rate, the aliasing went away so you don't hear anything (except distortion when the volume is set too high).
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: greynol on 2012-02-27 01:41:14
FWIW the older versions of Audition seemed to have problems generating pure sines above 16/17 kHz, couldn't figure out why at the time. (it wasn't a playback-distortion problem, directly burning the WAVs to a CD also resulting in aliasing on playback).

I will have to see hard evidence before believing it since none of my testing with either Adobe Audition 1.0 or 1.5 demonstrate the behavior you describe.  The testing involved capturing my speaker's output with a microphone.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: christopher on 2012-02-27 02:13:35
FWIW the older versions of Audition seemed to have problems generating pure sines above 16/17 kHz, couldn't figure out why at the time. (it wasn't a playback-distortion problem, directly burning the WAVs to a CD also resulting in aliasing on playback).

I will have to see hard evidence before believing it since none of my testing with either Adobe Audition 1.0 or 1.5 demonstrate the behavior you describe.  The testing involved capturing my speaker's output with a microphone.


Afraid that'll never happen  as I ditched Audition a long time ago. You could see it in the waveform after generating sines; above a particular frequency (from memory, somewhere between 16 and 18 kHz) the resulting waveform had aliasing and distortion - the waveform was not a pure sine - as if the lowpass rolloff was too sharp or the algorithm wasn't quite tuned properly. No resampling or playback and rerecording was necessary to view the imperfect waveform, you could simply zoom in to the freshly generated tone. Perhaps my Audition install just hated me, I could never be bothered to really fix it as I'd already begun to use other audio editors by then.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: extrabigmehdi on 2012-02-27 02:14:41
FWIW the older versions of Audition seemed to have problems generating pure sines above 16/17 kHz, couldn't figure out why at the time. (it wasn't a playback-distortion problem, directly burning the WAVs to a CD also resulting in aliasing on playback).

I will have to see hard evidence before believing it since none of my testing with either Adobe Audition 1.0 or 1.5 demonstrate the behavior you describe.  The testing involved capturing my speaker's output with a microphone.


Perhaps the playback inside Audition. There's definitely this problem with soundforge, that's why I  generate the sinewave, but then play it in foobar.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: greynol on 2012-02-27 02:47:35
There is no such problem with Audition.

FWIW I had an issue with subtracting samples at full scale with Audition 1.5 and have since gone back to 1.0, but again, no issues with incorrectly generated pure tones at any frequency permitted by the chosen sample rate.

Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: christopher on 2012-02-27 03:26:43
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: saratoga on 2012-02-27 03:54:58
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
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-27 04:50:11
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 .
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: greynol on 2012-02-27 05:15:53
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-27 05:25:24
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: greynol on 2012-02-27 05:31:16
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-27 05:57:10
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: mzil on 2012-02-27 08:09:42
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 (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.]
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: halb27 on 2012-02-27 09:27:40
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: Bjossi on 2012-02-27 16:14:37
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: BoraBora on 2012-02-28 01:18:10
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.
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: smz on 2012-02-28 02:51:47
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
Title: Which is the highest frequency that You can hear?
Post by: IgorC on 2012-02-28 03:15:03
I will ask Administrators to close this poll. A new one is open. http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=93733 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=93733)
Thank You.