Which manufacturers have hearing aids that amplify up to 20,000 Hz? I am currently trying one by Widex that only amplifies up to 1ok.
I may have jumped to conclusion. I know I read some article about this several months ago now. It discussed the different technical aspects of hearing aids, such as what frequencies they can amplify and how they can compress frequencies. They may not be able to amplify beyond 10000 Hz. But they can compress them and make these high frequencies audible to the ear.
Frequencies above 8,000 decline rather quickly as we age but that is not unusual. Hearing 16k at around 60 decibels is actually considered fairly normal for the 30-40 age range.
Presbycusis, yes.
Not being at 0 decibels in that range is normal, even in our 20s, yet not everyone develops tinnitus. Or do you mean a sudden, significant loss. As in one day you can hear 15kHz at 30 decibels but an acoustic trauma suddenly pushes it to 70 decibels?
I was thinking about progressive loss as part of the aging process, and how that may or may not lead to tinnitus. But here is what I struggle with! How do you tell apart hearing decline caused by natural degeneration from that caused by acoustic trauma? Insult to the ears doesn't have to be a significant one time event. It can be the result of a number of small insults that all add up to a large total.
I have had a higher frequency hearing test. My hearing above 15k is slightly above average for my age; my loss in one ear is between 6k and 12k.
How do you know what that average is?
When I go out looking for the hearing loss curves that correlate to age groups, I find something like this:
Frequency stops at 8 kHz!
Frequency stops at 8 kHz!
Frequency stops at 8 kHz!
This graph tries to push it to 16 kHz, but data points are missing to cover the entire range. I am not surprised that it's missing, there are not too many sources for researchers to pull that data from. The majority of all audiograms ever done in the world only go as far as 8 kHz. That has been the standard for a long time now, and it still is.
The high end of the frequency range in this graph appears to have been manually filled in with a pencil, not plotted by a machine or a computer program.
No one cares for the far end of the hearing range. Scientists just tested it some ages ago and found that we can hear up to 20000 Hz and they said OK, that's that, they recorded the fact and never looked back at it.
We may not learn something significant related to tinnitus by studying these far ends of the hearing spectrum. But it's just so simple to do these days! Why would we not test it? Where is the interest? Where is the curiosity? If nothing else, it can serve as an early warning system for when our hearing is deteriorating too quickly. "Professionals" don't care about it until our hearing is already too deteriorated and we are fit for hearing aids.
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