192khz headphones.. exist?

[Richi]

i think richi is considering the sample rate, not nyquist.

so in that light his claim that he can hear up to 15khz is completely reasonable.

i'm aware of no documented case, ever, of a human hearing a 30khz tone. it's simply impossible. you'd have to be a mutant. not human.

if it were true i'd urge him to go get his hearing professionally tested and end up in a study at a local university.

there will be a lot of people who are very interested in this case.

If I could hear only up to 15KHz, I would probably shoot myself immediately.

Jokes aside - no, I meant frequency i.e. Nyquist in your terms.
And how do you think has this been tested - if not professionally.

Actually I always knew I could hear quite high frequencies. In the 80ies I constantly heard that TV on standby in the closed cupboard (Wandschrank).
Or the so called ultrasonic zirping devices that were intended to make rats, dogs and similar go away.

But it was only when I went to a health examination for my PPL (private pilot license), where they found out "professionally". And yes, the doctors have said they haven't seen that yet.

So I was joking that I cannot make excuses telling my wife I haven't heard her - in case I just didn't want to hear.

The regular tests were with sinus, but I actually hear rectangular waveforms up to higher frequencies. Plus when it is really really 32KHz+, I do not hear a sound anymore, but feel the "pressure" or some kind of "tickling" in the headphones.

R.

[Keith99]

that's amazing, I always thought 20K was the absolute maximum of human hearing. I am surprised the doctor had a device that would measure higher than that even

[aciddose]

high frequency transducers are trivial.

the "tingling" is oscillation of the entire cochlea. the brain can't identify the frequency because generally near-by hairs are activated at the same time, similar to a Fourier transform and the frequency is estimated from that.

instead what you get is sort of like a very low level hissing and odd patterns similar to what you'll see if you look up videos of standing wave effects. the brain manages to filter this out as noise (correctly identifying it) but you still get a sense of something there.

there are ways you can trigger these effects without the mutations. divers are supposed to experience them for example at certain depths.

i could hear up to about 22 or 23k until i was 17 years old. the upper range of cutoff in analog synthesizers had a irritating hissy quality there which was very distinct from the rest of the range.

i've now got a standard adult range limited to about 17k. it starts to cut more than 3db around 16.5 and falls sharply by 18. 18 is completely inaudible unless i put a bud directly in my ear and crank the level.

similar to how you'll get aliasing higher up in a filter with naive saturation in software. it sounds good up to a certain point, then goes out of tune and metallic.

this doesn't prove you'd want 192khz headphones though. in fact i bet the opposite is true. listening to a normalized spectrum at a high enough rate must sound quite annoying. 48khz probably sounds "nice".

[Richi]

this doesn't prove you'd want 192khz headphones though. in fact i bet the opposite is true. listening to a normalized spectrum at a high enough rate must sound quite annoying. 48khz probably sounds "nice".

I agree, that "nobody should have the need for 192KHz headphones".

In some other thread I mentioned the studio monitors I have (bunch of older Adam A7) and I must say I immediately heard the difference between these and other stuff available at the time of buying. Only then I looked up their specs which write of 35KHz tweeters.

Just out of curiosity I looked up the vendors page 3-4 days ago and a successor (Adam A7x) is mentioned there. What is interesting in this context, that they claim to have improved their ART tweeter technology and that the monitor tweeters now can go as high as 50KHz.

I wonder why a vendor would do this if there would be no use for that. Marketing as high megapixel counts in cameras? I haven't heard the A7x, but I may try to compare them to my old gear.


R.

[BertKoor]

they claim to have improved their ART tweeter technology and that the monitor tweeters now can go as high as 50KHz. I wonder why a vendor would do this if there would be no use for that.

Because they can, apparently without much effort.