Let me possibly qualify that logarithmic ear ( and maybe withdraw Eve's linear ear). I can't find ear response data for very, very low sound levels. Nature gives quite a few logaritmic response levels. The eye is linear at very, very low light levels, but by the time there's enough to make out, roughly, the edges of an illuminated object you've passed it intto the logarithmic range. Photo detectors, quantum rate and thermal devices are linear which is great for quantitative rediation ower measurement for absorption spectra. Emission for gases however give lines of intensity that can run to 4 orders of magnitude. A cheapie silicon diode has a short linear response for voltage across it then goes into a logarithmetic response that is pretty good. A photomultiplier tube doen't put out voltage, it puts out current. Feed it into the silicon diode and you can get all the emission lines on the same chart, as it's now except for the bottom 1% on a logarithmic scale.

Frustrated with the yellow pages and the web I ran over to NIST. The ones I were looking for were in France, and elsewhere. Jerry (one of NIST's brighest stars) spared me a few minutes and xeroxed a few pages from the Cole-Parmer scientific supplies catalogs. The oscilloscopes they sell to universities for undergrad physics and EE lab courses are just the ticket. I'm trying to see if in can get one on a VISA debit card. You can order on a little form on the web quite easily, if you have a corporate or institutional account, but that stopped me dead. I'm waiting for a reply to the email I sent them.

That simple experiment I did with Basic's Sound command isn't the only one I did, and there are several things that didn't work out. Running up in frequency by octave steps stopped at a much to low frequency (after sound command arrange to print frequency on the screen in the same loop while the note is playing, theoreticaly a crude way to estimate your hearing range. It's crude because you have no decibel control.)