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Comment by wheybags | Hacker News Reader

Adding one not-missed item to the list: the annoying high pitch whine

Even worse when your grandparents couldn't hear it and thought it's perfectly OK ta have TV buzzing 24/7 in the background.

15KHz aprox. Not every body notices it

At what age does it go away to hear this?

I'm in my late 30s and I still hear it. But seemingly none of my co-workers can.

I know because once one put a "test your hearing" website and they all thought it was a sham until I told them to cut it out with the annoying whistle.

But I thought by now I would no longer be annoyed by those.

Probably I'm less annoyed than before.

That's only for TVs, though. Computer monitors had higher refresh rates and were not audible.

I could hear them. They can't have been that high.

What you hear is the horizontal refresh rate, scanlines per second. For NTSC television and CGA video, that's 15.7 KHz and within the audible range of quite a few humans. 640x480x60fps noninterlaced VGA is twice that at 31.4 KHz, which mostly isn't audible although a very few exceptional cases might. Higher resolutions are higher still, of course. That said, as with anything involving analog frequencies, there might be harmonics or resonances that could be in a range you can hear.

I could definitely hear CRT monitors at resolutions well above 640x480, so it can't have been the horizontal refresh rate.

I remember that I always noticed the sound when someone turned on a TV or CRT in my house when I was growing up. I miss that.

That depends on the age of the computer monitor. Older ones could whine.

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