Sunday, July 14, 2024

Is it true that autistic people have sensitive ears/hearing? How does it affect them?

Is it true that autistic people have sensitive ears/hearing? How does it affect them? 

I had a physical before going into the Navy including a hearing test. They told me that my hearing was 6dB better than average. That doesn’t mean superhuman, just much better than average.

Remember CRT televisions? The flyback transformer runs at about 15.75kHz. Most people think they can hear up to 20kHz because the entire audio industry keeps parroting “20Hz to 20kHz” over and over. I know they can’t, because I can hear that whine and the vast majority of people have no idea their TVs were making that sound. I would be in the basement and I could hear when someone turned on the TV upstairs, or vice versa.

A cassette tape for aligning and setting the speed of a deck was rather expensive. Like many with ASD/Asperger’s, I was chronically underemployed and underpaid. So I never could afford to buy a set of cassette test tapes. Whatever TV shop I was working in would have a couple of those test tapes, and the owners seems to be set on finding an excuse to make me pay for a new set of tapes.

Well… so I didn’t use their test tapes. I aligned my decks and made my own. But not with test tones, with music that I like and listen to a lot. So I know just what it is supposed to sound like. I’d record it in mono to set head tilt accurately. I could set tape speed faster and more accurately than with a 3kHz test tape and a frequency counter. The frequency counter only updates every second, and you have to wait for the reading to stabilize so you’d have to tweak, then wait at least 3 seconds before tweaking the speed again.

Whomever I was working for generally insisted that I could not set the settings accurately enough that way. I’d challenge them to prove it. I never had one do the settings more accurately than I could with my own equipment.

One of my tests for anything motorized is to listen to it. I might use a long screwdriver pressed against one ear and the thing I’m troubleshooting.

Anything with high power and high frequency, like switching power supplies, has the possibility of making noise due to magnetorestriction of the ferrites, and the piezoelectric property of high uF ceramic capacitors. Normally such power supplies are quiet, but they may make sounds when things are going wrong such as overload or certain parts failing. So I listen for sounds emanating from them.

I also smell electronics as part of troubleshooting. When parts overheat or burn, they give off different smells depending on their composition. I also look for subtle discolorations.

My eye is pretty good, too. Again down to money… most TV shops would have expensive color bar generators for setting the color and such on TVs. I modified my Commodore 64 to put out more accurate colors than it does out of the box. I wrote a program so it would output color bars, a grid of lines or dots, a cross hair or just a dot in the center, and different test tones. Again, the TV shop owners would initially insist that wasn’t good enough, but could not do the settings on a TV more accurately with their $2.5k alignment generators.

When I was repairing arcade games (video games, pinballs, crane games, etc.) I would listen for subtle differences in the sounds they would make. Joysticks and buttons, the solenoids in pinball games, the quality of the whine of the motors in crane games and motorized video games change (and sometimes emit different smells) when things are wearing out. People also tend to smash the buttons differently if they seem nonresponsive.

I’ve worked in a number of TV/stereo repair shops where I’ve found out that they were giving me the tough dogs. That would be fine if I were being paid hourly, but since I was paid by commission as contract labor, that was clearly unethical. But you know what? I rarely noticed. To me, they were just more repairs. I’d just fix them and get paid. I’d generally find out when someone would slip up and say something about it in front of me.

G—-t, I’m an X-Man!

Don’t worry, I’m not an egomaniac. My self-esteem crumbles easily, so this feeling will last until someone says a harsh word to me and I’ll go back to feeling like worthless dirt.

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