Unscientific hearing test: how good is your hearing?

but w/ shitty laptop speakers like everyone else

12 kHz. Tinnitus drowns out anything higher than that. :(

I'll dispute that. I have mad crazy tinnitus, and 17k was my upper limit for hearing something. Tinnitus, as I understand it, is not actually hearing loss, it's more like phantom hearing. It seems to be more neurological than physiological. But we don't really know for sure.

There is, though, a MAJOR flaw in this test, in that it depends on your speakers or earphones.

I feel depressed now - how bad will my hearing be at 30? 40?

need to stop playing loud music on headphones

standing next to speakers at punk shows finally took its toll I guess

how bad will my hearing be at 30? 40?

Better question: how much better will your sound equipment be?

just stop listening to music for a few years and wait for your hearing to grow back

it needs to grow. use some miracle grow

Sadly, that doesn't happen either.

I have pretty good sound equipment kenan - it's kind of embarrassing tbh

An embarrassment of richness of audio?

the problem is my music sounds so good that I never don't not want to be listening, so yes, an embarrassment of richness

so good it hertz

I wish hearing grew back :/

so good it hertz

Perfect. Thank you for that.

There are a lot of ways to lose your hearing, and we honestly don't fully understand the interplay between brain and ear quite enough to say, "Never listen to loud music!" because people are different. Getting older is obvious, because the loss of bone will lead to to the loss of the tiny, tiny bones in your ear as well. Loud sounds can damage your hearing, but sometimes it comes back quickly, and sometimes never at all. Tinnitus is the weirdest thing of all. It's correlated with hearing loss, but not at all linked causally. We have no idea what's going on there, really.

fuck was it perfect, should of course have been 'hertz so good' but what can you do eh

No need to remind everyone of early Mellencamp.

14 thru laptop speaker, 16 thru headphones

latterday bryan adams, more's the shame

I feel worse for people who remember Bryan Adams songs than people with slight-to-moderate hearing loss, tbh.

real low point for mel c imo

Jesus 12 is the highest I can hear, even in headphones. I knew my hearing was screwy.

Or your headphones might be crappy. So take heart!

Nah, I have very bad hearing :( I'm soemthing like maybe 50% deaf in one ear? I need to get it checked out properly mind you.

high frequencies are for losers anyway, voices/normal sounds occur in the midrange tbh

And fucking AWESOME sounds are in the low range. No matter what Geir says.

poll chipmunks vs johnny cash

As long as I can hear in the mid range, and also hear and feel the kind of bass that makes tendon not so affectionate toward bone anymore, I'll be a happy guy.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

huh, i was reading through this thinking i'd done it before, not noticing the posting date.

17k, with the volume up. i feel i can hear the tiniest bit of not-silence in 18k, but... no.

weird. i answered "16" a year back, but i can now hear something in nearly all of these. only 22 sounds like dead silence. past 15, though, they're all just pitched hissing at the edge of audition, so maybe i'm hearing some kind of interference and not the actual test tone. hard to tell.

10

15

17

15k--earwax and infections, not loud music.

~14-15, did lots of damage in my 20s

high frequencies are for losers anyway, voices/normal sounds occur in the midrange tbh

I did this again with my very good headphones and... well, after 12khz I can still hear something but its like a very soft distant hiss? That cantbe the actual frequency tho cos in that case I can hear all of them and that cant be right.

I have an actual hole in one eardrum so its very unlikely my hearing's that good tbh.

10. Not surprised. I continue to morph into my father.

21K. Tone sounds lower than the 16-18k ones. the click of the sound file playing I can hear for all of them.

Ive spent the last decade obsessing over having earplugs in at every show ever, or if not, wet toilet paper.

19K

14K wtf?

I'm saying 20K, the last two seem silent to me.

I tried the 8K one, damn near deafened me!

15 through ipod headphones. interested to try with other better headphones/speakers although tiny earphone speakers shouldn't have a problem with high freqs, right?

also ;_;

15k and i had to crank it. 16k there is absolutely nothing

my constant ambient hum is at about 14k, i now know *thumbs up*

i can still remember the show where i woke up the next morning and knew i had really fucked something up. thanks trans am!

oh god yeah that happened to me a couple of years ago, scared the shit out of me. felt like I was underwater all day :(

I can hear 16, but 17 is nothing.

16, that's okay, half way.

I notice a real difference in frequency response if I swap ears when I'm on the phone, but it doesn't seem to make much difference for these. 17 is faintly there in both (a little louder in the right) but 18 is gone in both.

Oh shit! 12 kHz was the highest I could definitely tell I was hearing something.

17kHz. I will start to feel old when I can no longer hearThe Mosquito (17.4 kHz), but I'm afraid it won't be long now.

actually I can barely make out the 18 khz tone, and I can definitely make it out here. I'm really just posting this for my future reference.

shit, I can hear a faint, squealing something all the way up to 22 khz (though 22 might be a bit of a stretch), but it's hard to separate the tone from interference + my imagination + the ringing in my ears from hearing lower tones.

so, 18 for sure, 19-22 inconclusive but damn my ears hurt.

*cochlear nerve melts*

Can't hear 17, 18, 19 & 20 at all (even with volume all the way up), but can hear 21 and 22.
Does that make any sense?

Yes. Hearing loss can occur at specific frequencies, with both higher and lower frequencies intact.

I have so-called 'disco-ears' for sure.
Can't hear a thing people say in a crowded room.
I suppose these are the frequencies that do me in.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I have problems hearing things people say in crowded rooms, too, but I've always figured that it was auditory processing disorder.

Disco ears!

auditory processing disorder

Different roads may lead to Rome, in this case.
With me it is definitely a matter of damage done during my high volume teenage metal head years.

I can hear up to 20, but I am wearing noise-cancelling earphones, and without them I doubt I could hear past about 16, the last couple were barely audible.

with these headphones I can hear up to 21

whoa with headphones in i can hear up to 21 too!

"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,