10 kHz test tone: check how far your playback reaches into the treble

Wikipedia's Hearing range article says, "The commonly stated range of human hearing is 20 to 20,000 Hz." A 10 kHz tone sits an octave below that top edge. One cycle of it lasts 0.1 ms.

Start quiet and raise the volume slowly, since a high tone can sound sharp and tire the ear. A pure sine has no overtones to blur it, so roughness you hear usually comes from the playback chain rather than the tone. A speaker driven too hard adds copies of the tone at whole number multiples, here 20,000 Hz and 30,000 Hz. The first copy sits at the top edge of the commonly stated hearing range, so don't count on hearing either one as a clue.

A missing tone has several possible causes. The gear may not reproduce it, the volume or mute setting may be off, or a speaker grille may be covered. Check the playback chain first, since it's the part you can swap and test, and try a second device before you think about your ears. Small speakers and some wireless links may cut the top end, so a quiet result on them tells you little.

Hearing does change with age. According to the same article, the range usually starts to shrink from around the age of eight, and people differ a lot at high frequencies. That's the story for the 15 kHz tone, so this page only flags it.

This is a listening check, not a hearing test or a speaker rating, so if hearing is your worry, a professional test is the right tool. Use the player on this page rather than a call or voice chat, since those are built for speech, and the FAQ below explains the limits. If you want 10 kHz next to another tone, the full tool lets you type any frequency and stack up to four tones.