I have no way to know how loud the tone was. I tried it on three people, ages 25, 33, and 40. And no, it wasn't right in their ears, in all three cases it was from several feet away. At the beginning of this thread you didn't think people could hear in that range at all, so why are you now so sure about the conditions I was playing the tone under?
I did read that humans can hear *up to* 20KHz but was always told that as people age, they lose their high frequency hearing and that middle age people, like that 40 year old would hear up to 12KHz.
What you say is exactly why the audiologists said HA's wouldn't help me. Most HA's do not help above 6kHz. However, the Oticon Epoq DOES. I am mild for most of the way, moderate at 4-6kHz, and severe at 6kHz and above. The audiologist said I should just learn to live with mild hearing loss. I did my own research and discovered that the Epoq is effective up to 10kHz. Which is why I bought them, and lo and behold they are very helpful in my daily life.
Sounds like a high frequency loss not uncommon to elderly people. Is the Oticon Epoq good for severe loss at and above 6000Hz?
Nope...you would not learn to tune out the remainder of the noise. Like Steve says, earplugs never make things silent. You can still hear with earplugs. Anyone with normal hearing, can still hear with earplugs. Heck, I have 35-40dB loss in most frequencies, so if I put in earplugs I should hear everything at 0-10dB, right? Which means not at all? Nope, I can still hear through earplugs. If you had perfect hearing, you would still be able to hear things even with earplugs. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you want, though.
I will still take normal hearing over what I have anyday. Earplugs would add a conductive loss of 30db so add that to 35db and youll need 65db minimum sounds to start hearing anything. My loss starts at 65db at 125Hz and I hear pratically no environmental sounds unaided. But even without earplugs, a quiet room is what? 30db? Youd still experience silence then. If you can hear thru earplugs, either your earplugs are junk or theres some very loud sounds nearby.
Yeah, 0dB is a pretty unrealistic level. I seem to remember that average hearing loss is 10-20dB so NOBODY hears at 0dB. My hearing friend got a test done just to see, and she tested at 2dB in one ear, 5dB in the other, and the audiologist told her that was incredible! (I think my wife has similar levels...her UCL is below my MCL haha!)
Nobody hears at 0dB, 0dB is silence! They have special rooms that are created to be 0dB rooms. Google for "the quietest place on earth orfield labs" to read about them, I forget the name and I'm on my pager right now.
August 2, 2005
Although it is tempting to think that "absolute silence" corresponds to 0dB (as Gerard Sombroek and Bart de Landtsheer do in an article in the (Dutch) "Personal Computer Magazine" of this month) it is not correct. The decibel (dB) scale is logarithmic and a zero intensity - the absence of sound - cannot really be expressed by a finite number of decibels. 0db is merely a reference value: 10db represents ten times that intensity and -10dB represents one tenth of that intensity, while 20db represents hundred times that intensity and -20dB one hundredth of that intensity, etc.
As it happens, the sound pressure which corresponds to 0dB (one picowatt per square metre) has been chosen to be near to the threshold of (human) hearing but some humans can perceive sound below this level and no doubt many animals can hear much fainter sounds. So 0dB is not "zero".
Even if you were to place a microphone in the "perfect quiet" of outer space, the occasional molecule impinging on the sensor would still create a pulse of sound, and the time-average of the force exerted on the sensor could be converted to a non-zero quantity in watts per square metre and hence to a level in decibels.
As with so many aspects of our universe, "absolute zero" does not seem to be attainable!
-------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anechoic_chamber
http://www.audiojunkies.com/blog/902/the-quietest-place-on-earth-orfield-labs
-9.4db! That's the world most quiet room! So 0db isn't absolute silence, it is just silence for nearly every human. There are animals and instruments that can hear/detect fainter sounds! -10db is still sound, just 1/10th the SPL energy of 0db, or 10 times more quiet. Did you know many audiometers have a -10db to 120db range? 2db hearing loss is still incredibly keen! I keep reading that 0db is considered the threshold of human hearing, how common is it actually for humans to get to that level?
----------------------------
In general, humans hear quite well. We have this idea that other animals, such as cats and dogs, hear much better than we do, and that's essentially true, but that also depends on what we mean by "hearing well." The sounds we hear have two basic properties, amplitude and pitch (i.e. frequency). The amplitude of a sound tells us how loud it is, and is commonly measured in decibels (dB). The pitch tells us wether the sound is the high shrill of a prepubescent boys' choir or the low rumble of an old refrigerator, and is measured in hertz (Hz).
When we say that dogs and cats hear better than we do, we mean that they can pick up on a larger range of sounds than we can. They can hear high-pitched sounds that we can't perceive. When it comes to amplitude, however, humans hear about as well as most other animals in the frequency range that we are the most sensitive to. Very few animals can hear below the human hearing threshold of 0 dB at any frequency.
Why not be happy with being able to hear at 20-30 dB aided? I don't understand. <confused> If I could hear a majority of environmental sounds with 60-70 dB aided hearing, why should a person with 20-30 dB aided hearing be concerned about hearing at 0 dB?
As for good enough, id say 25db should be the minimum, after all, it's also the limit that's considered "normal" hearing. 0db is considered "perfect" hearing.