Re: Home hearing test - sweepable oscillator?
- From: "Mike Rivers" <mrivers@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 30 Dec 2005 14:11:59 -0800
kenwinokur@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> As I roll into my fifties, I am wondering what my hearing is actually
> like. The last time I talked to an audiologist (to get molds made for
> musician's earplugs) I asked him if he could test my hearing. He said
> that his machines didn't go up beyond 8 KHZ.
That's because audiologists diagnose hearing problems, and they're
really only concerned with your ability to understand speech. That's
why they routinely test only out to 8 kHz. Even the mobile test lab
that they set up at AES shows only tests to 8 kHz and everybody going
in for one of those tests is either an engineer or musician (or both).
Besides, audiologists sell hearing aids, and hearing aids only work up
to about 8 kHz.
They measure thresholds - they play you a tone that they know is too
quiet to hear, then increas the level until either you indicate that
you can hear it or smoke starts coming out of the headphones. What they
record is the threshold at which you can hear each of the test
frequencies, adn they make up your hearing profile from that.
While you can send a 15 kHz tone to headphones or a speaker and just
verify that you can hear it, that's one thing. To tell how well you can
hear it (relateive to other frequencies) is much harder to test, and
you can't really do it at home with simple equipment.
If you can't find a Mac program to generate tones, you can probably
find a test CD somewhere. Sweetwater Sound used to have one as a
giveaway, maybe they still do. If you're a regular customer of theirs,
you might ask.
A couple of years back, there was a program that was designed as a home
hearing test. I was kind of skeptical of it, as was just about everyone
else who read about it or tried it, and I'm pretty sure it's
disappeared, proably for good reason - it wasn't useful. But maybe
someone still has that kit and will pass it on to you.
.
- References:
- Home hearing test - sweepable oscillator?
- From: kenwinokur
- Home hearing test - sweepable oscillator?
- Prev by Date: Re: Home hearing test - sweepable oscillator?
- Next by Date: Re: UAD-1 and Plugins
- Previous by thread: Re: Home hearing test - sweepable oscillator?
- Next by thread: Re: Home hearing test - sweepable oscillator?
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
