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The average human hearing range is 20-20,000 Hz. However, I can only hear in the range 30-14,800 Hz. As I am below 30, it seems unlikely that this is due to age-related hearing decline.

Thus, what are the potential causes? And should I be concerned?

Rodrigo de Azevedo
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Benubird
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    First, why can't be age-related? You are presumably not a teenager any more. Also, why do you expect to be "average"? The average human is 175 cm tall, but a 30 yo who is 165 cm did not have a "height decline". – rumtscho Feb 19 '16 at 09:33
  • @rumtscho because looking online, age-related hearing loss is usually after 65 - not even close. I couldn't find anything about standard deviation in hearing ranges, so I assumed that it was very small. – Benubird Feb 19 '16 at 11:42
  • Welcome to health SE :-). It is a good idea to include your research into your question, since comments might get deleted (or overlooked if there are many of them). It would get you better answers and possibly more upvotes. – Lucky Feb 19 '16 at 15:19
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    rumtscho raises a good point. Did you have previous hearing tests that showed a higher range? Maybe that's been your range your entire life and there's been no decline at all. After all, above 14800 is very high and barely audible to most people. – Carey Gregory Feb 20 '16 at 02:50
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    Hearing is best in adolescents and starts to decline (slowly) in teenagers. If your source was talking about hearing loss after 65, they probably used some strict definition such as clinically significant hearing loss (the person starts noticing problems in everyday life and visits a doctor) - but note that a standard audiogram doesn't even go above 8 kHz. The question is still interesting though, because it invites a good explanation of hearing loss with time. – rumtscho Feb 20 '16 at 16:04

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It's possible the speakers you're using to test are not able to output frequencies that high, even if they claim they should be able to.

Aside from that, I'm pretty sure by age 30 your hearing ability for higher frequencies has declined some - check out this chart http://jslhr.pubs.asha.org/data/Journals/JSLHR/934609/m_JSLHR_58_5_1592fig1.jpeg. If you want to research it more, search for ISO 7029.

g491
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