Hearing frequency range as it relates to speaker frequency response (1 Viewer)

[kalm_traveler]

I've always been told by doctors that my hearing is great, and decided to do a little test now that I have speakers which are unquestionably able to reproduce sound above my physical ability to hear.

As everyone knows, the average young human can hear from about 20Hz up to about 20,000Hz (20kHz) so I found a page which lets you test your upper limit here: http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-you-hear-this-hearing-test/

I'm a little leery of that accuracy though because I also downloaded a tone sweep in uncompressed WAV format, and I can hear that through it's duration, however when I play the tones on the linked page I can't hear anything beyond 17kHz for sure, really 16kHz.

Anyway, this got me thinking about speaker frequency response and lossy VS lossless digital audio. If indeed I can't really pick up anything above 16-17kHz, wouldn't that mean that my ears could be 100% satisfied with some degree of lossy compressed music file audio? I've recently been cleaning my digital music library and have been astonished at what a huge difference I hear going from 192kbps MP3 to 320kbps MP3 or FLAC. I do not notice much if any difference between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC from initial testing.

Is there another side to this that I am overlooking or unaware of? Just curious for the sake of understanding the complete picture!

 

[andySu]

Edit.

 

[Al.Anderson]

If indeed I can't really pick up anything above 16-17kHz, wouldn't that mean that my ears could be 100% satisfied with some degree of lossy compressed music file audio?

I was curious and found this article high up on google:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr12/articles/lost-in-translation.htm

I was too lazy to try and absorb it all, but from what I could glean from 10 minutes, there's 2 aspects to the answer. First loss of frequency response about 17k is an aspect of mp3 encoding, not necessarily all lossy encoding. And second, there are lossy artifacts introduced besides high-end frequency loss.

So bottom-line, my take is that it would depend on the particular encoder and your personal hearing loss whether you could hear a difference.

 

[andySu]

never mind.