Hello, my name is Matt. I record, edit, and mix music for a living. My profession requires an extremely discerning ear. This little listening test is to see if you can pick up subtle differences in volume.
What I have below is a series of 1khz sine waves, in sets of two. In each test I’d like you to try to discern which tone is the quieter of the two. The first test contains one tone that is 0.8 decibels quieter than the other. I believe this to be the quietest incremental difference of volume the average person can readily discern (evidence suggests 1 decibel to represent this volume difference, but I give the ear a bit more cred).
The following sets of sine waves contain even smaller differences in volume.
Please answer honestly, and try not to guess.
Can you hear which sound is louder?
You may also want to view the MP3 Sound Quality Test
Ah I knew it! The answer key is WRONG (as of 3/25/2010) The text is correct when you get it “right” but you have to choose the wrong answer to get it right. That freaked me out, I know I’m not crazy.
Good Catch. Correction made.
[...] hard work listening to all this over-stimulation! This test has a series of sine waves – can you hear which is louder? I was very happy to be able to get Q1 and Q3 [...]
this was more tricky for me…
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Manage to find this on a whim, All test manage to make excellent was not rocket science really just saying, Using a Beyerdynamic T1 as my headphones, its true indeed that audiophiles ear are quite sensitive lol
easy. Got all three.
The only way for me to know the difference was to overdrive my speakers.
The louder sine would create slightly more distortion.
Otherwise I only had 1 of 3 correct (the last one is in question as I perhaps loaded the wrong audio file).
i only got one right and i think by mistake… the sinewaves resonate in my right ear really weird, I can’t tell if my hearing is bad or if it’s the location of my speakers.
I suck at this. All wrong. I changed all my right aswers. Why oh why did I do that. Fail
It might’ve been easier if I didn’t have to download them but got question 2 and 3 right… interestingly. By the third question I was wondering if I had gotten used to the sound.
Got all of them right. I was actually concerned for a minute about one of them because the difference is subtle (i won’t spoil which one). Really nice test, but it’s passable if you have a decent hearing and a pair of quality headphones.
Got all three. I feel like a genius.
I stupidly forgot I had turned on loudness equalization and couldn’t tell a difference. (Except for the first one.)
Then, I turned it off… and I got them all correct. (I didn’t notice the “I hear no difference.” option for some reason, so I got the last one wrong.)