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Poll

In the following list, what is the highest frequency you can hear?

24 kHz
[ 6 ] (3.3%)
22 kHz
[ 17 ] (9.4%)
20 kHz
[ 28 ] (15.5%)
19 kHz
[ 38 ] (21%)
18 kHz
[ 42 ] (23.2%)
17 kHz
[ 15 ] (8.3%)
16 kHz
[ 22 ] (12.2%)
14 kHz
[ 8 ] (4.4%)
12 kHz
[ 0 ] (0%)
Can't hear any of these
[ 5 ] (2.8%)

Total Members Voted: 297

Topic: What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear? (Read 17596 times) previous topic - next topic
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What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #25 –
16 kHz is still my upper limit (41 yrs old now) using sweep.wav.  It doesn't matter to me if I use expensive Grado SR325 headphones or cheap Labtec computer speakers for this test.  I can hear the distortion from the computer speakers in the very highest range (> 20 kHz), but that's well beyond when I really stop hearing the sweep.

ff123

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #26 –
Quote
16 kHz is still my upper limit (41 yrs old now) using sweep.wav.  It doesn't matter to me if I use expensive Grado SR325 headphones or cheap Labtec computer speakers for this test.  I can hear the distortion from the computer speakers in the very highest range (> 20 kHz), but that's well beyond when I really stop hearing the sweep.

ff123

I'm surprised that cheap Labtec speakers can even reproduce 16KHz!   

I didn't find that sweep.wav very helpful to determine the highest frequency I could here (when I tried it quite awhile ago).  Right about at the point where I stopped hearing the tone, I started hearing the distortion (harmonics?) so I couldn't tell if the harmonics were covering up further HF that I might have been able to hear, or what.  Maybe if I had a better sound card...

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #27 –
Quote
16 kHz is still my upper limit (41 yrs old now)

I used separate tones in 250 Hz steps, and could hear upto 15500 Hz fine. After that I just heard a "click" at the begining and the end of a test tone.
So I had to answer 14 kHz  .  But I'm 3 years older
I just hope it's the equipment
--
Ge
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #28 –
19.1 kHz, 21yrs old. :-)

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #29 –
According to the sweep.wav it's something like 18kHz (Will test it later more carefully).

Some months ago I thought my hearing was excellent when I heard all the way up to 22kHz. But then I upgraded my soundcard. The old on-board card just made some strange (high) noises and I thought it was the 22kHz tone but now there's silence.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #30 –
I don't think my equipment can properly play back the sweep.. I think I was able to hear it up to about 3 seconds, which is 15.4kHz .. I'm 17.. my hearing has got to be better than that. 

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #31 –
where can i download the sweep from?

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #33 –
19.5 almost exactly, so I put 20.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #34 –
 up to 17 crappy kHz, and no more. (Even so, I'll continue using my MPC -quality 8.5 switch)
Maybe is my hearing or maybe my equipment.....I'm 18.
I own a SbLive 5.1 (well known by its horrible hypertreble response [16+kHz] )and Creative FourPointSurround FPS 1000 speakers...
As I used the tone at full volume, I vote NULL at all, because the SbLive adds horrible downpitching and artifacts over the 17kHz range so I can't do this test properly.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #35 –
Quote
Quote
I discovered that the frequency response on my Sennheiser HD-600s are hardly flat above 5KHz.

This graph is not the frequency response of your headphones, so don't worry.

http://headroom.headphone.com/layout.php?t...&subTopicID=122

Quote
we took what are, in our opinions, the ten best sounding headphones, measured them, averaged the data all together, and used that composite data as the ideal headphone against which all individual headphone data is compared. Thus when you see a frequency response graph on a headphone product page, what you are actually viewing is how that particular headphone's frequency response differs from an ideal headphone

Even if the graph does not reflect the response of my HD600 absolutely, it reflects their response relatively (to Headroom's "ideal"). They shelve down the upper frequencies. Obviously this is not a problem at an application level because few people will deny that the 600 is one of the finest pair of cans you can buy.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #36 –
Full sweep.wav on HD-600 and SBLive! and in Winamp volume 20%...
Also I can't watch conventional CRT tvs, since in 10 min I have  a headache, thanks god we own projection as well and I can't hear it...
Also I can hear mutted TV 10-15 meters away if it is on: useful feature when someone forgets to switch off tv in a house and we are going out...
I'm 22 (almost 23)...
Am I the only one who can't listen to classical music cds (in HD-600) since I can hear every single whisper and breath of the musitians... though, I usually stop noticing this if I do something else in addition to listening to the music...
My endian is bigger than yours.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #37 –
i have just listened to the sweep and im not quite sure what im hearing / listening for.  i can hear tones througout the duration of the clip, but i dont believe that what im hearing is the tone from the frequency its supposed to be.  if i try to follow the tone from the beginning i find it very hard to distingish amongst these other tones at about 4:00 seconds.  can anyone tell me what these other tones are that i am hearing?

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #38 –
Around 18-18.5 kHz (not sure of the exact value) for that sweep.wav and ~17 kHz for most normal music... So I voted 17 kHz...

(I'm 21 years old by the way...)

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #39 –
Almost 19 KHz. Age: 23, soundcard: Hercules GTXP, Headphones: AKG K290.

Soundblaster Live users shouldn't perform this test! That soundcard has a rolloff after 16 KHz, which falsifies the results.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #41 –
16.5 kHz @ age 35.....    I guess that seems pretty normal based on what I'm reading.  Enjoy your hearing while you can kids.

Daffy

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #42 –
If you guys are using consumer soundcards to do these tests, I'm sure a lot of "higher frequencies" you are hearing are actually lower harmonics..

Those  Philips SBC HP150 are only rated to 22khz.. not to knock on you or anything, but I really highly doubt you were hearing 24khz..

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #43 –
Sound Blaster Live! or Audigy owners can participate if they resample the sweep to 48kHz. Otherwise their sound cards will convert it for them and there is constant aliasing noises in lower frequencies.
I recorded the output of my Audigy with Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, you can download the output here.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #44 –
I can hear 12khz, but it is noticably lower in level.  I can hear nothing higher.  I am 56.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #45 –
Quote
Soundblaster Live users shouldn't perform this test! That soundcard has a rolloff after 16 KHz, which falsifies the results.

tnx for pointing this out, my results were 16.5 khz with that card, i retested later on pro genelec boxes playing the sweep from some video editing app, the result is close to 19 khz (~18.7).
 

i hate this card more and more everyday...
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #46 –
I could hear the sweep.wav up to something like 18 or 19 kHz, but from that point on, the pitch went down and the soundcard made weird noises (which somehow remind me of the intro to Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" ). So I voted NULL. My cutoff can't be as low as that (I hope).

Age: 16
Equipment (laugh if you want to): Terratec 128i PCI, cheap'n'nasty, half-broken 20€ Vivanco headphones.

CU

Dominic

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #47 –
It seems many people is experiencing aliases. You should burn the sweep on a CD and play it in a CD player.

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #48 –
Quote
It seems many people is experiencing aliases. You should burn the sweep on a CD and play it in a CD player.

Doesn't seem worth a CD, altho I have some throwaway (cheap) CD-R's and could try it... but there's no guarantee that all CD players will reproduce the highest frequencies accurately either (especially cheap ones).

When I was 9 or 10 my hearing was tested (firecracker went off next to my ear resulting in temporary deafness and concern about hearing) and I believe I could hear up to 22KHz.  Likely that's diminished by now to about the standard late 30's age hearing (16-17KHz).  Lots of loud concerts between age 15 and 18 probably did no good at all. 

What Is The Highest Frequency You Can Hear?

Reply #49 –
Here's the spectrum of the recording of Case. That's more or less what he majority of people are listening to in their soundcards :



But the description of some people (frequencies going down) match rather the Resampling in SoundForge, quality1, antialias :



In the control panel, go to multimedia/audio/advanced properties/sample rate conversion quality, and set it to "best" if you don't want to get the above.

The original is