so for a few years i've had no problem with my hearing at all.. can hear all sounds just fine. and no sensitivity problems.
but i've always heard an extremely faint soft but absurdly high frequency hiss or tone in my ears when i'm in a very quiet room and not doing anything else.
is this normal? or is there some interference with my hearing/ears?
I'm not sure where to put this so i put it in the everything else section of the forums.
but i've always heard an extremely faint soft but absurdly high frequency hiss or tone in my ears when i'm in a very quiet room and not doing anything else.
is this normal? or is there some interference with my hearing/ears?
I'm not sure where to put this so i put it in the everything else section of the forums.
I think it's normal, but I'm not a doctor. It depends on how loud it is, if you look up "tinnitus" there's a lot of info out there on the subject. I have noticed this for myself my whole life so I guess that's why I said I think it's normal. I tend to have sensitive hearing though and I notice it mostly when I have too much coffee.
Everyone has a high frequency background noise in their hearing apparatus. For most people without clinical tinnitus the noise is so faint to be inaudible unless they are in a VERY quiet environment where the noise is above the background level. When I was in my early 20's I had no symptoms of tinnitus but I was able to hear this background noise in an anechoic chamber after 15 or so minutes in the dead quiet.
If you have tinnitus this noise is elevated such that it is audible...in mild cases you hear it when it is quiet, like at night in bed. More severe cases make it audible at higher levels of background sound. So if you only notice it in very quiet circumstances you may be normal, or it may be an early sign of tinnitus.
If you have tinnitus this noise is elevated such that it is audible...in mild cases you hear it when it is quiet, like at night in bed. More severe cases make it audible at higher levels of background sound. So if you only notice it in very quiet circumstances you may be normal, or it may be an early sign of tinnitus.
do you by any chance have high sensitivity speakers running parallel to cables which may or may not be carrying digital information? it could be anything, vga or hdmi cables in the walls, ethernet running alongside speaker cable...
high frequency hiss in an audio system is usually a sign of digital making its way through to the analog side.
Does the pattern of the noise change?
As others have said, it could be your hearing, but I'm going to take a different approach and say you've already marked that off as a possibility.
high frequency hiss in an audio system is usually a sign of digital making its way through to the analog side.
Does the pattern of the noise change?
As others have said, it could be your hearing, but I'm going to take a different approach and say you've already marked that off as a possibility.
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it isn't anything to do speaker cables or wires.... the noise is from inside my head.
it usually only happens when it's super quiet or when i'm lying in bed on a quiet night.
its not a ringing tone but more of a hissing sound or extremely faint white noise at a ultra high frequency. but even when i'm in bed at night with no sounds around me it's still hard to hear..
but sometimes i can hear it if i listen for it carefully.. and from what i can hear it sounds like it's far above 20khz and it's constant and doesn't change.
it's super super mega high frequency but very faint..... and i usually do hear it when im in a completely silent room like in my bedroom about to go to sleep.
sometimes it sounds almost like radio static. but there's no voices or changing tones or anything weird like that...
just plain static at a extremely high frequency.. (far greater frequency than what the ringing sound would normally be if i had a ringing in my ears)
and sometimes I hear a completely out of phase low frequency rumbling pressure wave through my head and ears when a car drives by on the highway (pretty far away) which feels absurdly odd if you ask me.. although i'm not really concerned about it that much..
and again... the frequency is always constant and never changes but it's never noticed unless i'm in a completely totally silent room usually at night.
it usually only happens when it's super quiet or when i'm lying in bed on a quiet night.
its not a ringing tone but more of a hissing sound or extremely faint white noise at a ultra high frequency. but even when i'm in bed at night with no sounds around me it's still hard to hear..
but sometimes i can hear it if i listen for it carefully.. and from what i can hear it sounds like it's far above 20khz and it's constant and doesn't change.
it's super super mega high frequency but very faint..... and i usually do hear it when im in a completely silent room like in my bedroom about to go to sleep.
sometimes it sounds almost like radio static. but there's no voices or changing tones or anything weird like that...
just plain static at a extremely high frequency.. (far greater frequency than what the ringing sound would normally be if i had a ringing in my ears)
and sometimes I hear a completely out of phase low frequency rumbling pressure wave through my head and ears when a car drives by on the highway (pretty far away) which feels absurdly odd if you ask me.. although i'm not really concerned about it that much..
and again... the frequency is always constant and never changes but it's never noticed unless i'm in a completely totally silent room usually at night.
Most people with tinnitus report a high pitched, but certainly not ultrasonic tone. I am at a loss as to how you place it far above 20kHz...kind of like saying you saw a flash and it looked like a microwave??? Usually it is reported as a simple pitch, kind of monotonic or diatonic. I have bracketed mine with an oscillator and headphones and it mainly seems to be in the neighborhood of about 4.7kHz.
I do know what 20khz sounds like I've used a program call audacity and set a custom sample rate of 500000 samples per second and then set the 20khz tone to play
it's easily heard as a hissing wizzle sound but not as high as the hissing i'm hearing in my head
I can hear 25khz faintly but it's not much of a tone anymore and is more like a hissing sound sorta of what it sounds like the hissing static in my head but very faint even in a silent room
i'm also autistic i'm sorry if that's whats causing all the problems.
it's easily heard as a hissing wizzle sound but not as high as the hissing i'm hearing in my head
I can hear 25khz faintly but it's not much of a tone anymore and is more like a hissing sound sorta of what it sounds like the hissing static in my head but very faint even in a silent room
i'm also autistic i'm sorry if that's whats causing all the problems.
Agreed, but I don't need to be in a very quiet room to hear it. Most of the time I don't hear (or rather: register) it because my attention isn't focused on it. It's present 24/7 and equally loud in both ears.
I do know that my hearing is more adept at hearing sounds than most people's. When I'm at a friends apartment, I can hear the dog bark and whine that lives in the appartment two flights up and on the other side of the stairwell. My friend can't hear that.
Occasionally, I have short bursts of tinnitus that fade in a matter of seconds and sound like a loud, high pitched steady tone, in one ear only. Apparently this is experienced by about a third of the population, so I don't worry.
What are you using to hear these tones, as it is exceedingly unlikely that any laptop speaker can reproduce tones in this region. I suspect most home speaker systems would have problems reproducing over 20kHz, and to my surprise I have also seen sound cards that support sample rates beyond 44kHz that don't do a very good job above 20kHz if at all. (Several laptops I've owned amongst others) Easy to fall into that trap..
As an aside you may well be able to hear 20kHz at this point in your life, but need to use hardware that can actually reproduce those frequencies to be sure.
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