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Comment by mamon | Hacker News Reader

What's funny is that people tend to buy headphones with insane top frequencies (20-22 kHz), even if most humans cannot really hear sound of such frequency. When you are a teenager and have right genetics then there's a chance that you might hear 19kHz tone. If you are over 30 years old you are probably limited to 17 kHz already. Of course it gets even worse with age.

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As long as there's recorded audio up there, you might as well reproduce it well, and even standard CD-audio goes up beyond 20KHz.

Also there's plenty of individual variance in people's hearing. No need to fit to the lowest common denominator even if the majority can't hear it. As a tall person, I appreciate that airplane seats aren't pitched to cut your kneecaps off after 6'0" (ok, maybe that's generous to the airline industry, but you get the point).

I don't think that is a problem. One could think that if someone doesn't hear sounds above 17 kHz then they lose 3/20 = 15% of sound spectrum but in fact they just lose a small part of the highest octave (from 10 octaves total) which is about 5%. In most cases those high frequencies contain only overtones from lower frequency sounds.

The hearing can really get worse with age, but definitely not because of beeiong unable to hear highest frequencies.

The flyback transformer sound from CRTs used to drive me absolutely nuts. Fortunately now we have flatscreens, besides that if we'd still be using CRTs I would no longer be able to hear it.

But that was proof to me that whoever picked that frequency didn't have children or dogs.

I'm in my 40's and can't hear above 13kHz any longer. :(

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