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Comment by kps | Hacker News Reader

Since I was curious, I took the recording from Wikipedia, which is sped up 10×, and slowed it down 10×: http://vocaroo.com/i/s0dMCeANPrbX (No affiliation, just the first no-reg audio host I found.)

Edit: you may need to turn up your volume. Much of it (including the first ten seconds) is pretty quiet.

Edit²: I confirm hearing nothing at all using a laptop's built-in speakers; you'll need headphones or external audio.

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Wow, that is so cool! I've been listening to whale recordings wrong this whole time.

Is this chart right that the whale calls are up to 180db? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_vocalization#Sound_level... That's enough to blow human ears up.

Remember that it is rare to be close enough to a whale to experience the full pressure

The acoustic impedance of water is 3500 that of air: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_impedance so the intensity of that sound will be 3500 times less than it would be in air. Also, the impedance match between the water and the air in your ear canal is terrible (think of how little sound you hear under water if someone above water tries to talk to you, that pressure wave has to pass through that barrier twice, the sound from the whale once).

Yeah, but what if it made a noise while it was out of the water, checking out a boat or something?

Also, wow, whales are amazing

Interesting, except on my macbook I can't hear anything. I wonder what the low frequency cutoff is.

Increase the volume. It's very low pitch track.

With the volume at maximum on my 2015 MBP I get sound... of some description, at least. It just doesn't sound much like it does through headphones. It sounds like speakers trying to reproduce something that's beyond them ;)

My computer is connected to an average HiFi and speakers (£300 / $500 worth) with an on-board soundcard. I didn't need to adjust the volume to hear the whale.

It reminds me most of waiting on the platform of a very deep metro line, and hearing the rumbling of a different metro train, some way above.

That, or the (apparently reasonably authentic) sounds played in a Sea Life centre.

The MBP's sound hardware might not have a problem with it, but I was using the MBP's built in speakers ;)

They're generally pretty good on the newer models, I think, as laptop speakers go. My 3-word review might be "better than functional". So having heard them make a tolerable go of music and games I was interested to see how they'd manage 52Hz. The answer: badly.

That'll just be the speakers.

Sennheiser HD 600 plugged into my MBP comes in loud and clear (or loud and eerily wobbling bass noise)

Even on 8cm speakers you typically have a -3dB point between 100 and 150Hz. For the tiny speakers in notebooks and smartphones it should be even higher. That means they maybe could reproduce 100Hz, but at an extremely low volume. And 50Hz is well out of scope.

Yeah that is strange and kind of disturbing too. Thanks for sharing!

Definetily need headphones for this one.

I don't hear a single sound.

It's probably your speakers. A human can certainly hear 52Hz, mains hum is 50Hz (or 60Hz if you're in North America) and clearly audible.

Quite true. It's also not uncommon to end up with harmonics of mains hum (at 120 Hz), which is more noticeable to human hearing than 60 Hz.

Sounds (and even feels!) pretty impressive on my active speakers.

The door in my room started trembling. Cool!

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