I can hear 17000 Hz, but not 18000 Hz.

(btw - this test will also depend on your speakers and the ambient environment)

i can hear 17000.

i obviously haven't been to enough concerts.

I can't hear 15 Hz or above 14000 Hz, but my friend, ten feet away hears all the tones. Weird.

WHAT???!!!

...and he's totally freaking out that I can't hear what he hears. This may be the end of our friendship. THANKS A MILLION BUNNIES! :-P

I can "feel" 18000, and 13000 just freaks me out like tiny needles or something. agh. aagh.

Right now I'm just rocking out to the 20 Hz hum. It's like a cat purr for my ears.

oh mi god, i can't believe i can hear all those.
good god my ears hurt.

it feels like somene swabbed my side head tubes with wire

At the volume I normally listen to music at, I can hear 18 kHz. At a slightly higher volume, I can hear up to 22 kHz.

I can clearly hear 20 Hz. 15 seems to be out of my headphones' range.

I can hear 17000 not 18000. My colleague complained about 19000 sitting across the room from me.

I can only hear up to 14000. Oh dear.

Ah, if I turn my speakers up, I can hear up to 15000 Hz, so things are not as bad as I thought they were.

I can hear up to 16 - but the 50, 20, and 15 sound like, well, total silence. I sure hope that's my speakers' fault.

Would I be a spoilsport if I pointed out that these tests are meaningless on arbitrary computer equipment? Wildcard factors include soundcard and driver, application and speakers. On similar tests I get harmonic frequencies coming out of the speaker that are clearly not the ones intended. Others I'm pretty sure the speakers aren't reproducing at all.

I couldn't hear the 22K but my cat could. When I clicked on it, she gave a 'could you lay off the racket on that infernal machine, I'm trying to sleep over here' look.

In Children of Men, there was a line of dialogue where Julianne asks Clive about the ringing in his ears. She says something like the ringing in his ears was the nerve cells at that frequency dying and he'd never hear that frequency again. Is that true?

I would definitely recommend headphone for this, and non-laptop speakers for the lower ranges. I can't hear any low ranges on my nasally laptop speakers (I need a subwoofer), but I can hear up to 21000 hz without headphones. Cool! (Also greetings MetaChat. I just joined.)

Hi, CitrusFreak12!

I have some THX speakers, so is it wrong for me to assume that the sounds coming out of my browser are fairly faithful?

I can't hear anything above 13000 Hz, even with the speakers cranked.
And I'm going to hell.
Thanks a lot.

In Children of Men, there was a line of dialogue where Julianne asks Clive about the ringing in his ears. She says something like the ringing in his ears was the nerve cells at that frequency dying and he'd never hear that frequency again. Is that true?

Sort of, according to my layman's understanding. One of the possible causes of tinnitus is damaged hair cells in the ear. Each hair cell will respond to a certain narrow band of frequency, and during normal operation the brain learns to calibrate "no sound" to whatever physical state the hair cells are usually in when there's no sound around. If they're physically damaged, the brain's calibration becomes inaccurate, and so you can get false signals at that frequency. And in mammals, hair cells don't grow back. So if you lost all of the hair cells that responded to a given frequency, you wouldn't be able to hear that frequency anymore.

Umm. I could hear 18000 and I wanted to die. Oww!!!

I hear SOMETHING on all of them (up to 22). And now my ears are ringing....

I recall a textbook I read for a Acoustics of Music class in college, which featured in chapter one a picture of the devestated inner-ear cilia of a guinea pig (as in literally the animal) exposed to damaging sonic levels. For some reason it was one of the most disturbing photos I've ever seen. It was like a forest after a hurricane. Jesus.

I can hear all of them. Some of them make me feel like my teeth are getting drilled.

I could barely hear 18k, and not hear 19k at all.

Not only do the speakers affect it, but so does the fact that you're using a computer to listen to it. Assuming it's using a 44.1kHz sample rate, you can't reproduce a sound with a higher frequency than 22.05kHz -- and that's not going to be anything like a sine wave. It'll be more of a triangle wave.

Thanks for the explanation chrismear.

I can't hear them, but 17k and above made my ears hurt so badly I thought they might start to bleed. So I stopped going down (I started at the top.) Yuck! That was horrible! They still hurt!

I ditto the remarks about this being moot if you're trying it with some very well behaved speakers. Some fairly nice studio monitor subs that I've worked with don't respond below 21Hz. Pushing the Dolby kit that my PowerMac's plugged into to 15Hz at much volume felt like a bad idea. And I think the higher frequencies made next door's baby start crying.

Also - thanks for asking about that Children of Men quote, and for the solution, chrismear. I was wondering (worried!) about that when I watched the (great) film.

I'm extremely hypersensitive to sound in general, and particularly aware of infrasonics and ultrasonics. I generally carry and use earplugs. (If you see me at a amplified sound event, chances are I have at least a spare pair in my geek bag.)

I don't have time to do this particular test, but I've used software tone generators, a very nice sound card and rather nice, nearly reference grade speakers and I can usually hear up to about 21-22 khz, and down as low as 5-20 hz, but there are few speakers that can produce that low - high excursion, large diameter woofers can do it, but it's mostly inaudible. Transducer woofers are even better down in those ranges, but anything from 0-20hz is more felt then heard anyway.

I can probably hear outside the range my nice soundcard can produce, as I can actually audibly hear those "ultrasonic" pest repellers or ultrasonic rangefinders. Every single one I've ever met that was on I've been able to hear. They annoy the fuck out of me. I guess I'm just a pest.

I used to get very puzzled by the ultrasonic rangefinder on my Grandma's Polaroid camera, because I could hear the capacitor for the flash whining as it charged up, but couldn't figure out what the second high pitched (and out of harmonic order, compared to the flash) sound was until I messed around with her camera holding my ear to the various parts. It wasn't until much later that I saw an array of ultrasonic rangefinders on a HERO-1 demonstration robot that I realized what it was that I was hearing on my Grandma's Polaroid.

I also hear CRTs, be it a television sets, computer monitors or oscilliscopes or the like. They emit a very high pitched sonic and ultrasonic whine. I can hear my neighbor power up his 40" CRT TV all the way down the road.

There's nothing so quiet to me as a power outage. It's amazing. No appliances, TVs, CRTs, pest repellers. It's amazing.


(My color vision is out-of-gamut, too. I can easily differentiate colors in 24 and 32 bit colorspaces, and used to do a lot of paint/ink mixing and colormatching. Every single graphics or print shop I've ever worked at I eventually ended up becoming the magic color-matching guy you'd go to to check and spec colors.)

Also, I can hear the difference between a CD and a 48khz DAT or WAV. I can hear the digital grain of the sample rate on CDs, and it's always annoyed the everliving shit out of me. It's like very, very fine but hard, glassy sand in my ears.

I actually prefer a high bitrate or VBR mp3 or other compressed audio* , because the compression and decoding artifacts actually break up the noise of the sample a little. Granted, I can hear the huge, fat, chunky blocks in the compression just fine, too, but it's less annoying to me. It feels and sounds more like analog compact cassette to me. Just a little warm distortion, some chunky bits, but none of that keening knife edge of a static 44.1khz 16bit sample. (*not WMA, WMV, RA or RP! Run!)



It's at this point other audiophiles will tell you that I'm crazy and what I'm saying is impossible or at least highly improbable. However, I'm fully willing to test this out via double blind tests, as long as I get to use my headphones, choose new ones and familiarize myself with the new gear. I'm well versed in digital recording and production, the frequency range limitations of various sample rates and types and so on.

I've already tested it out before, 'cause it's damn puzzling to be constantly going "Do you hear that? That high pitched whine!? It's driving my crazy!" and to have everyone around you go "Uh, I don't hear anything."

I could hear up to 15000, but that was it. I saw a news program once that teenagers have been tuning their phones to ring at sounds not audible to adults (ie: teachers), so they know when someone is calling them during class. I cant' wait to try this on the kids tomorrow and test their hearing.

Loquacious, we cannot allow you to waste time here when there are so many crimes going unsolved at this very moment! Go, go, for the good of the city!

Man, I think me and loquacious were separated at birth.

Hm. I just tried it at home (learning, in the process, that my home speakers are better than my work speakers). At home, I can hear up to 20,000, and can hear 50hz, but still not 20Hz. Should I be freaked out that everyone else seems to hear low sounds, but I don't?

1. The speakers in my work computer are a joke, and, alas, I didn't bring my nice headphones today.
2. At home, I can easily hear the whole range.

It's very possible, Miko, that your home speakers can't reproduce something as low as 20hz.

I can hear up to 13000. And 50 is okay but nothing lower. I couldn't hear the mosquito clip that was played/posted a while back.

OMG! The mister can only hear the 50hz. He can't even hear 8000 hz. I knew his hearing was worse than mine, but geez.

Loquacious, we cannot allow you to waste time here when there are so many crimes going unsolved at this very moment! Go, go, for the good of the city!

Dude, there's this thing called wireless. And I can get access on my cell and stuff, too. And I've got like this little portable keyboard thingy? It's pretty rad. You should totally get one.

Also, you really should put that frozen chicken down and get some pants on or something, or at least close the drapes 'cause man that was just weird, y'know? I'm not even sure I want to know how you did that, much less why.

I'm blind as a bat, but can hear through walls, practically, to make up for my poor eyesight.

I used to live in a big old house, and on occasion would hear my husband mutter something about me. I, from the other end of the house, upstairs while he was downstairs, would call "I heard that!", to his astonishment. Heh.

Also, I hear the high-pitched stuff all the time as described by loquacious.

And I have perfect pitch too. Play me a note, I'll tell you what it is. I'm also cursed with a terrible voice. It's a curse because, having perfect pitch, I can hear exactly how far off-key my singing is.

I can hear up to 17K, which is not too bad for my age.

Interestingly enough, I have a lot of holes in my hearing at 60Hz harmonics (fan frequency - thanks computers!)

Did the test again; this time with good headphones (Koss Portapro). It appears that I can only hear up to 12 kHz. Phew, what a relief.