[bigshot]

That oscillation means there is probably distortion going down there because the tone is lower than the cans can comfortably reproduce. It probably extends upwards a bit too.

 

[swaffleman]

Interesting. I'll go ahead and believe that it's distortion then. But hearing ever so slightly below 20 hertz isn't bad I'd say...it's lower than what is practically needed probably.

I tried to see how high I could hear, I stopped hearing anything after around 17,900 or so. That's probably pretty standard. I read that after one's teenage years high frequency hearing tends to drop off a bit.

 

[TronII]

UPDATE:

I tried out this site, https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/.

I officially hear actual tone around 16-17 hertz. I hear sound below that but it sounds like an oscillation, like listening through a fan (am I hearing just the mechanism of the driver itself working?). Going below 16 hertz there is absolutely no discernible tone.

That's actually uncommon but not abnormal. And you're conclusion about the latter case seems sensible.

 

[TronII]

Interesting. I'll go ahead and believe that it's distortion then. But hearing ever so slightly below 20 hertz isn't bad I'd say...it's lower than what is practically needed probably.

I tried to see how high I could hear, I stopped hearing anything after around 17,900 or so. That's probably pretty standard. I read that after one's teenage years high frequency hearing tends to drop off a bit.

Expressing volume in terms of percentage doesn't really tell us much; although, it does tell us you're probably pluggin your headphones directly into the front of the PC. Have you tried using the port in the back? Magnetic fields from PC components add a lot of noise to the front I/O.

 

[bigshot]

At a certain point, our ears lose the ability to discern pitch in low frequency sound. At a bit lower, we no longer hear it, just feel vibration. When a transducer is forced to reproduce frequencies it wasn't designed to reproduce, it distorts. Often that distortion occurs in frequency ranges an octave higher than the signal's frequency. It's likely that the distortion at 17Hz is creating distortion at 34Hz. That might be what you're hearing.

In any case, there is no reason to think that hearing slightly beyond the general range of human hearing is any kind of benefit. The fringe frequencies are the least important ones for recorded music. It's the core frequencies that matter most. Protect those and don't pump ultra high frequencies into your ears at loud volumes.