When I was a kid I asked adults about that whine from TV sets and none of them knew what I was talking about. The conventional answer was that adults have a hard time hearing the 15khz whine due to age related hearing loss but I am older than my parents were back then and I still hear it just fine on those rare occasions I get near a CRT.
By ‘viable’ I mean that companies can charge enough to remain in business by catering to a market segment that is willing and able to pay for the differentiation at margins sufficient to maintain the boutique sales channels necessary for low volume specialty goods.
Basically it is analogous to the audiophile market where discerning listeners are expected to pony up thousands of dollars on each piece of gear.
That’s my take.
YMMV.
Back when the Athlon 64 was new I was very annoyed by noisy desktop computers and went through great expense and trouble to pick out quiet parts for a PC, frequently I found the reviews of quiet PC parts from sites like Tom’s Hardware were just plain wrong and that from the power supply to fans and hard drives I had to try multiple parts before I got something really quiet.
I am thinking about building a new PC but I haven’t done it for years since I was so traumatized.
A note on gaslighting:
If Bob hears something and Alice doesn’t, it is normal for Alice to doubt Bob’s claims…though that isn’t ideal, it isn’t really gaslighting because when it comes to sound quality some. people can hear a difference in a demagnetized audio CD and others on gold plated conductors for digital audio.
Without a relationship with some degree of intimacy, defaulting to the predominance of one’s own experience reinforced by the consensus of public opinions is not unreasonable.
YMMV.
As a general guide though - SSDs are silent, and be quiet! (bequiet.com) has PSUs, CPU coolers, cases and fans optimized for silence (including coil whine)
That only means that they had more hearing loss than you. If I was blindly guessing, you listened to less overly loud music in your youth than did your parents.
Edit: I guess my point is that it's still hearing loss, just not age related.
Yeah, I have some experience as a sound engineer in the sense of wiring up instruments and the board so people can do a musical performance but I can’t stand doing it much because I think almost every concert or bar is way too load. I think all the other sound engineers are deaf.
The navy found out that sailors working on aircraft carriers with jet aircraft were losing their hearing in a matter of months and did the initial research on the subject which revealed that different people have different threshold for how much noise accelerates age related hearing loss and that for some people this threshold is as little as 65db so there is no practical safe noise level.
Now my wife complains that I can't hear the (lot lower tones of the) beeps when the washing machine has finished.