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High Frequency Hearing Thresholds

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March Audio

March Audio

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Below is a link to the track mentioned in the original post. Its high pass filtered 20kHz to 22kHz.

How loud do you have to turn your system up before you hear anything? Do you hear anything at any volume?

PLEASE BE AWARE OF TWEETER DAMAGE!

Although its unlikely as the levels are low, to be safe my suggestion would be to set your replay volume to a loud level with another track and then play this one, rather than just keep cranking the volume up.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnQ0c7fb_4zLgQILvA6bipLPdBgw
 
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Blumlein 88

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Below is a link to the track mentioned in the original post. Its high pass filtered 20kHz to 22kHz.

How loud do you have to turn your system up before you hear anything? Do you hear anything at any volume?

PLEASE BE AWARE OF TWEETER DAMAGE!

Although its unlikely as the levels are low, to be safe my suggestion would be to set your replay volume to a loud level with another track and then play this one, rather than just keep cranking the volume up.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AnQ0c7fb_4zLgQILvA6bipLPdBgw
Listened and heard nothing.

So I slowed it down to 1/4 speed. Some very faint metal tinkling sounds. So I boosted it 26 db (20x), and heard a still not loud, but more obvious metal tinkling sounds. With good ears and normal speed nothing of this is going to be audible. And this is with nothing at all to mask any of it. What's left here isn't audible.
 

solderdude

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Interesting... the 'I can hear past 20kHz crowd (mostly coined by >40 y.o. audiophiles) claim that they can't hear above 16kHz (so also not these files) but can hear it when the HFenergy is correlated to sound.

I have heard this reasoning also from folks with speakers that won't do much above the audible range or using headphones that are rolled off even in the audible band so have my reservations about their hearing acuity.

Furthermore I don't nearly hear as high up as 30 years ago, yet, when listening to music I still have the illusion (it's an illusion as I checked my hearing) that I still hear as much 'upper treble/air/sound quality' as 30 years ago.

This could be that my brain 'compensates' somehow or that back in the days (before high-res existed but still had vinyl) the HF extension was not important that much and most of the audio info was below say 15kHz.
 

Blumlein 88

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Interesting... the 'I can hear past 20kHz crowd (mostly coined by >40 y.o. audiophiles) claim that they can't hear above 16kHz (so also not these files) but can hear it when the HFenergy is correlated to sound.

I have heard this reasoning also from folks with speakers that won't do much above the audible range or using headphones that are rolled off even in the audible band so have my reservations about their hearing acuity.

Furthermore I don't nearly hear as high up as 30 years ago, yet, when listening to music I still have the illusion (it's an illusion as I checked my hearing) that I still hear as much 'upper treble/air/sound quality' as 30 years ago.

This could be that my brain 'compensates' somehow or that back in the days (before high-res existed but still had vinyl) the HF extension was not important that much and most of the audio info was below say 15kHz.
Where is that time machine dude? We need to abx the hearing back then vs now. :)
 
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March Audio

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Interesting... the 'I can hear past 20kHz crowd (mostly coined by >40 y.o. audiophiles) claim that they can't hear above 16kHz (so also not these files) but can hear it when the HFenergy is correlated to sound.

I have heard this reasoning also from folks with speakers that won't do much above the audible range or using headphones that are rolled off even in the audible band so have my reservations about their hearing acuity.

Furthermore I don't nearly hear as high up as 30 years ago, yet, when listening to music I still have the illusion (it's an illusion as I checked my hearing) that I still hear as much 'upper treble/air/sound quality' as 30 years ago.

This could be that my brain 'compensates' somehow or that back in the days (before high-res existed but still had vinyl) the HF extension was not important that much and most of the audio info was below say 15kHz.
That correlation and audibility is no doubt due to one of the many mystical things that science does not yet understand, but which audiophiles experience. ;)
 
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OP
March Audio

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Listened and heard nothing.

So I slowed it down to 1/4 speed. Some very faint metal tinkling sounds. So I boosted it 26 db (20x), and heard a still not loud, but more obvious metal tinkling sounds. With good ears and normal speed nothing of this is going to be audible. And this is with nothing at all to mask any of it. What's left here isn't audible.

You know I never thought of slowing replay down to reduce frequency!

Has anyone else listened and heard anything?

Or have any suggestions of other tracks they would like filtered to see what >20kHz content can be heard?
 

swanlee

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I think it's obvious we can perceive freq above our hearing range, and mostly by perceive I mean feel and or have fatigue issues when a soud "WAVE" is cut off at the High Freq level artificially.

Even if I technically can't hear above a certain Freq I want my audio to be held in as big of a box as possible 24bit/96k and contain as much audio information sampled at the highest rate possible if it is not analog.

With cheap disk space and the abundance of High Res Audio I find no reason to even try and wodner anymore.
 

RayDunzl

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I think it's obvious we can perceive freq above our hearing range, and mostly by perceive I mean feel and or have fatigue issues when a soud "WAVE" is cut off at the High Freq level artificially.

Having always had a quite low internal high frequency cutoff myself, I don't find myself perceiving sound above my cutoff at all, nor do I experience fatigue when experimentally low passing music here in the labmotory just to see how low it has to go before I do notice something lacking.
 

mansr

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If I play a loud tone a bit higher in frequency than what I can hear, I will after a while get the same strained feeling in my ears as after being in a noisy environment. I speculate that the part of the ear that reacts to protect against loud sounds is still responding even though the inner ear sensing cells are not. If that's what's missing from CD quality playback, I think I prefer it that way.
 

swanlee

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If I play a loud tone a bit higher in frequency than what I can hear, I will after a while get the same strained feeling in my ears as after being in a noisy environment. I speculate that the part of the ear that reacts to protect against loud sounds is still responding even though the inner ear sensing cells are not. If that's what's missing from CD quality playback, I think I prefer it that way.

Yea things like this can certainly be preference based, I think their is definitely something to the idea that we perceive audio in some way shape or form and freqs we can't actually audibly hear. For me I do not enjoy that missing info in lower res audio.

So when people discuss High res and ONLY address feq response I just don't think that capture all the benefits from high res audio.
 
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