hearing tests - where and how?

I have tested the hearing of thousands of people and many of them will respond to a tone physically via things like head movement, eye movement and/or a puzzled look on their face exactly when the tone occurs yet won't raise their hand to conform they consciously hear it. At a subconscious level (it certainly seems)they are hearing it but they cannot consciously react and confirm it. This condition I describe above where you see a physical reaction but the person being tested does not respond by raising their hand always occurs within 5 or 10db of their actual conscious threshold where they do raise their hand.

ET

8K is adequate believe it or not. I tested people for five years. 16K is only one octave up. Getting equipment to properly measure higher would be really tough. If you have an HF problem 2,3,4,6 and 8K will show it as will word testing that emphasize consonants that require good HF hearing like words with s,th,ch and so on. I also prefer in the ear tips over over the ear headphones for accuracy and relief from ambient room noise for the most accurate results.

ET

Electroid,

I think I agree with Shadorne, who said this:

"Up to 12K is important. Higher than that is not really that relevant to music."

I had an audiogram a few years back and asked them to measure out to 12 kHz, which was as high as they could go, and one "step" above the 8 kHz where they usually stop. I had a slight rolloff.

The reason I think I agree with Shadorne (other than the fact that he seems really smart and proficient based on his posts to other threads and his own virtual system thread) is because I've heard those tones higher than 12 kHz with my "AUDIO-CD Hearing Test" CD, and they're REEEEEALLY high. Not pleasant to the ear, and would seem to be about on the same frequency as tape hiss, or maybe even higher.

So anyway, why not test out to 12 kHz for "us" audiophiles?

I agree that higher would be better. My point was that there are few people that are flat at 8K that don't have roll off at both 12 and 16K say but not enouh to deteriorate their HF hearing. As we loose hearing our brains compensate which is why people often aren't aware of a mild to medium hearing loss that happens over say a ten or more year peiod. Also it would be a lot more costly to both pay for and maintain calibration on equipment that measures higher.

I use my signal generator and can still hear 16K. You're right it can be painful and be careful a steady HF sinewave can damge the tweeter and your hearing.

ET

At such high frequencies the wavelengths are so short that placement of a transducer is not very reliable, and the perceived frequency response can vary from trail to trail. If you're trying to use speaker in a no-anachoic environment, minute head movements can vary the results. In psychoacoutic testing we trusted only forced-choice tests in which the listener tries to identify which interval contained the test tone over many trials. Low level hearing is a stochastic process, so the concept of threshold is just that. And then there's the problem with calibration . . .

And what difference does it make anyway? Why not just listen to the audio system of interest?

db