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Hearing range

PerryD

Senior Member
Indirectly sample related... I haven't tried this in awhile. If I can trust my Sennheiser 650 cans and Youtube audio, I guess at 61, I'm only good for about 28Hz to 13,000Hz :/ No comment on Yani vs Laurel.

 
I haven't tested recently, but like my Dad, my hearing used to extend up to 22k or so. And lest you think that's crazy, remember that tonally it isn't much higher than 20k due to the logarithmic nature of frequencies and their harmonics. The 20 Hz to 20 kHz range is approximate and is simply an easy-to-remember analog to 20/20 vision.

What's probably even less well-known is that we don't necessarily lose our upper-most hearing range as we age; we are more likely to lose specific frequencies. Each specialized hair in the inner ear is "tuned" differently, and they die at some point (this is partly what tinnitus is about). My former jazz combo leader, before he died unexpectedly a few years ago at age 63, had lost 14k and a few other smaller frequency ranges but not 16-18k!
 
Indirectly sample related... I haven't tried this in awhile. If I can trust my Sennheiser 650 cans and Youtube audio, I guess at 61, I'm only good for about 28Hz to 13,000Hz :/ No comment on Yani vs Laurel.



Listening from my handphone's loudspeaker, mine only up to 14kHz.
 
Also, related to what I said above about aging, our hearing is not linear, just as our vision is more attuned to hues within the extremely narrow green part of the spectrum vs. the super-wide blue spectrum where our sensitivity to different hues is quite minimal. It's all about survival and adaptation to the environment. So we hear more strongly where we NEED to hear, and that is also partly affected by the bass (vowel) and treble (consonants) extremes of most (but not all) languages. Predators and other factors contribute as well, to our relative strength in different hearing ranges.
 
Indirectly sample related... I haven't tried this in awhile. If I can trust my Sennheiser 650 cans and Youtube audio, I guess at 61, I'm only good for about 28Hz to 13,000Hz :/ No comment on Yani vs Laurel.



Similar here. I just turned 60 and I get to around 14kHz.
 
In order not to wake up my housemates, I turned down the volume by almost 60 dB during my listening, and though I could feel or sense things outside this range, I was only good for 38 Hz through 8800 Hz in terms of being confident I was hearing the video vs. sounds coming from my overhead lights, the computer, etc.

As listening even at this volume made clear how non-linear our hearing is, I'll have to run this again at higher volume during "normal" hours, and raise/lower the level accordingly. Hard to do with a mouse; when I bought the RME Fireface UFX, it was my mistaken understanding that the master level knob on the front can be used for quick real-time adjustments to the mains. Response time is slow with digital!
 
Also, for the record, I am now 61-½, and haven't had my ears cleaned in 3-½ years at this point. But I also stopped using headphones, except on extremely rare occasions, 5-½ years ago, out of fear that I could unwittingly cause early hearing loss or other issues, as I was previously spending many hours doing almost all of my digital production work (tracking, mixing) on cans.
 
Left ear doesn't perceive anything above 9k due to a virus I had a while back + lifelong problems with the eustachian tube. Some ears are just like that I guess :D

Right ear stops at 15k.

Also, very bad Tinnitus (almost unbearable at times - pure tones, sweeps, white noises, clicks, what not).

As long as I can hear SOMETHING, I'll make music :P
 
I've not done this in a while... Last time I had a hearing test my upper limit was around 14kHz

Just tried the YouTube video linked above.

I started having trouble at somewhere around 11kHz.

That was listening with my ATH-M50x headphones.

I then went to this website, which I have used before:-


There you will find many different kind of tests.

Use this one for the higher frequencies:-


The audio sweep there tells me that 11kHz is the highest frequency I can hear.

At the low end I can hear from somewhere between 20 and 30Hz

So, when it comes to EQ'ing my stuff, I invariably cut out anything below 35~40Hz and anything above 10kHz. So if anyone with a good hearing frequency range will no doubt think that there is a lot of stuff missing at the high end. But if I can't hear it, I can't make any creative judgements on it so I can't see the point of working outside of my range anymore.

It is also the reason that I ALWAYS use SPAN on my master buss.

Oh, I'm nearly sixty now. Tinnitus has been a problem for a long time. Too much Heavy Metal...
 
I appreciate the video for pointing out my significant hearing loss. Oh well, who needs high frequencies anyways. ;)
 
I forgot to mention that our left and right ears hear differently, just as our two eyes see differently (for instance, I have weak sensitivity to red in my left eye), and our shoulder heights are asymmetrical (which contributes to hearing differently in the two ears). As our weight changes, our hearing also becomes different, as the shoulders are reflective surfaces that affect how we experience sound.

The reason for all of this is why we have two of each to begin with, which is to spatially locate potential threats or sources of food.
 
Just checked and my ears made it to 12k. I had my ears checked a couple of years ago at the local Sam's Club with the same results. The top end doesn't matter because I have "the notch" at 4k, the presence range. Too much exposure to too many lead guitarists. At 70 and I need to hang on to what I have left so running live sound for my friends is not going to happen anymore.

There is one thing I am curious about. It's kind of o.t., but does anyone else's hearing get better when they apply back pressure (block nose, push air out lightly) to the eardrum? I'm wondering how and why it works.
 
25 and top out at 13.5k for whatever reason. My cousin around the same age can hear up to 17-18k through the same output so it is my darn ears. Hmph.

(Edit: Also, as the person after me mentions, I used the Reaper tone generator since the video sounded artifact-y to me, and it was hard to pinpoint if what I was hearing was accurate, I too would recommend another source for testing)
 
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