This is prompted in part by the near-war going on in another forum about the Furutech demag.
Audio writers, especially those of the objective data type, talk about 20hz-20khz being the limits of human hearing, excepting the occasional young person (when I was 16, I could clearly hear out to 22khz without more than about a 3db drop).
It happens I'm reading Helmholtz's classic 19th century work "On the Sensations of Tone," and his experiments show human hearing out to at least *40khz* with no substantial db drop. (Helmholtz's translator Ellis reports being able to hear 40,000hz from a tone generator at a distance of 100 feet-- this is on p. 18 of the Dover edition) Helmholtz's terminology is exactly the same (he of course refers to cycles per second rather than Hertz, but considers A to be between 435 and 440cps), and the experiments look pretty much the same as the ones I did in 11th grade physics lab 20 years ago. Except for the results.
So here's the question-- is there a problem with Helmholtz's saws and bows (or academic honesty?) that I'm missing, or has human hearing gotten substantially worse since the Industrial Revolution?
This is prompted in part by the near-war going on in another forum about the Furutech demag.
Audio writers, especially those of the objective data type, talk about 20hz-20khz being the limits of human hearing, excepting the occasional young person (when I was 16, I could clearly hear out to 22khz without more than about a 3db drop).
It happens I'm reading Helmholtz's classic 19th century work "On the Sensations of Tone," and his experiments show human hearing out to at least *40khz* with no substantial db drop. (Helmholtz's translator Ellis reports being able to hear 40,000hz from a tone generator at a distance of 100 feet-- this is on p. 18 of the Dover edition) Helmholtz's terminology is exactly the same (he of course refers to cycles per second rather than Hertz, but considers A to be between 435 and 440cps), and the experiments look pretty much the same as the ones I did in 11th grade physics lab 20 years ago. Except for the results.
So here's the question-- is there a problem with Helmholtz's saws and bows (or academic honesty?) that I'm missing, or has human hearing gotten substantially worse since the Industrial Revolution?