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Comment by yzhou | Hacker News Reader

A person can not hear a 22kHz tone doesn't mean he can not hear a sound that contains 22kHz components. For example, a square wave contains lots of high frequency harmonics, the more higher frequency harmonics it have, the "squarer" the square wave gets. An ideal square wave forms ideal "0" "1" states. A person's ear might not be able to hear a 22Khz sine wave tone, but he might be able to sense the steepness of "0" "1" state.

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First, if you can "hear the steepness" you really can hear higher frequencies, but I assume you meant "maybe you can hear higher frequencies but not higher frequency _tones_"...

People have suggested this. It's been tested in rigorous double blind tests— involving both real music signals as well as special test tones (Linked from the article). The tests were unable to show that people could hear the ultrasonics. Moreover, there isn't any physiological basis to expect people to be able to. You can't expect a stronger result than that.

Common 48KHz audio already goes a bit beyond what adults are known to be able to hear, so you've already got some headroom for "but what if a few people hear better than anyone the researchers have been able to find!".

Except that human ears don't directly perceive the waveform, only the frequency decomposition.

There's been countless A B X tests that showed conclusively that the vast majority of people cannot tell the difference between samples with and without the 22kHz+ frequencies.

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