The test can be affected by audio compression and cheap speakers

Aug 14, 2013 17:41 GMT  ·  By

You see a lot of people wearing glasses or contacts, but very few with hearing aids. That's a good thing, of course, but it does illustrate the fact that we tend to think of perfect eyesight as a very important thing and we easily become aware when our eyes aren't as good as they used to be.

That's not the same with hearing though, most people think of it as either having it or not. It's only when they have problems actually hearing things that they get help.

But that's not to say that everyone without an aid is as good at hearing as everyone else. In fact, your hearing is failing you, slowly, the more you age, particularly in the loud world we live in today.

ASAPScience has a very interesting video which, while not exactly a scientific hearing test, should give you reason to think. The video plays different sounds at increasing frequencies and tells you the age of your ears based on when you stop hearing the sound.

While it's a cool video and an interesting idea, there are plenty of caveats that prevent it from being very useful in a number of ways.

For example, the 19,000 Hz tone doesn't actually play since YouTube compression cut it out. There's nothing to be done about that, though 18,000 Hz is still high enough for most people.

But you might not even get that. To make sure you get the best quality audio, play the video at 720p or, even better, at 1080p.

Most lossy audio compression algorithms trim sounds that are at the extreme ends of what the human ear can detect and what standard devices can reproduce. MP3s can be so small because they actually remove some of the information from the song.

Since sounds above 16,000 Hz can barely be made out in most songs, it's not a big loss, but it does mean that tests like this can fail.

Even if you have the best quality audio you can get from YouTube, you're not guaranteed to hear the sound, as your cheap headphones or tiny laptop speakers may not be able to reproduce sounds that high. Headphones are better than speakers in this case, even mid-range ones should have no problem reproducing the frequencies.