Unscientific hearing test: how good is your hearing?

"Disco ears" is a good phrase but "hearing things people say in crowded rooms" already has a pretty good name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

(I am terrible at that too - if there's another conversation happening in the office I'll miss half of what the person talking to me says)

Barely 15. 320kbs MP3s are probably good enough for me.

With headphones and the volume up and the air conditioning off, I can hear something on all of them. 18 and 19 are just a faint hiss (maybe compression artifacts?) but the top frequencies are actual tones. I was worried there for a while!

I had an audiogram a few years ago and I was pretty flat out to about 14kHz, beyond which it dropped rapidly. They weren't testing absolute upper limit though, but amplitude profile. The audiologist bloody loved me. Just ran my own tests generating sine waves in Audacity and I can't perceive anything beyond about 15k now (and it certainly drops beyond 11-12k). Could be the soundcard or the headphones - maybe I'll burn some tones to disc in quasi-random order and listen on the Grados at some point...

I wouldn't worry too much about progressive loss in the mid-high teens - comes to us all (I'm 43 so my days of hearing 18k are over, I'm sure), it's down in the 2k-6k range where hearing loss is most destructive. Plenty of sound guys and musicians are fine out to the mid-teens but completely stuffed down there, like 20 or 30dB down from ideal.

As for MP3s - well, they rely on masking at high frequencies, so even if you're a young'un and can hear a full-scale 19kHz sine wave clear as day, doesn't mean you'd be able to perceive the lack of those frequencies in a psychoacoustically-processed lossy file of actual, busy, full-spectrum music.

14. I'm hoping it's just both these sets of headphones :/

i can hear 21 very faintly but not 22. i had to crank the volume up on my headphones to hear it though.

although 17 is the last one that sounds as loud as the others. idk

Same for me. Can hear up to 21, gets gradually quieter after 17.

on my headset I could hear up to 21

20 through MBP speakers. Fascinating how 20 is clear and completely noticeable and 21 is nada, not even a hope of straining, pretending to hear.

21 if I put my ear very close to a speaker but no 22 even then

I hear the slightest strain in 21 but it's so small that im going with 20. But hearing those notes feels so uncomfortable,