Question 1

Is this hearing frequency test free?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and there's no account to create. The quick check, the full run across the whole range, the per-ear result, the chart, saving a result on your device and the share link all cost nothing, and how often you take it is up to you. It's a frequency hearing test online in the plainest sense: open the page, press start, get a number.

Question 2

What frequencies does this hearing test cover, in Hz?

Accepted Answer

The full test plays 125, 250, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, 6,000 and 8,000 Hz, then carries on to 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 kHz. The quick check runs just that top half, which is where age shows up first. Worked through as a hearing test Hz by Hz, it doubles as a hearing range test: you find out where your range stops at the top, for each ear on its own, instead of getting one number for both.

Question 3

How high should I be able to hear at my age?

Accepted Answer

There's a table further up this page with the usual figures. Roughly: a lot of teenagers reach 18 or 19 kHz, most people in their twenties land around 17, by forty 15 to 16 kHz is common, and past sixty the top of the range often sits nearer 10 to 12 kHz. Behind all of it is the rule that about 2 kHz comes off the top per decade. That's an average across a lot of people, so sitting on one side of it isn't a problem to be fixed.

Question 4

What is a hearing age test?

Accepted Answer

A hearing age test takes the highest frequency you can still hear and reads back the age that number is typical of. That's the whole mechanism: one measurement, one lookup table. Search for how old are your ears and you'll find the same idea everywhere, usually as a single number with no explanation attached. It's a real trend and a fun figure, but it estimates one narrow thing. It says nothing about how well you follow a conversation in a busy room, which is what people usually mean when they worry about their hearing.

Question 5

Can I run a high frequency hearing test at home?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and it's the part this page does best: the guided test goes to 20 kHz. What it can't do is stand in for your equipment. Above about 16 kHz your headphones matter enormously, and plenty of perfectly good earbuds simply produce very little up there. If your result stops dead at 16 kHz on one pair and keeps going on another, believe the second pair. Bluetooth is the other variable, because some codecs discard the top of the range before it ever reaches you.

Question 6

Do I need headphones for this?

Accepted Answer

For a per-ear result, yes. A hearing test with headphones can send a tone to one ear and nothing to the other, and that's the only way to find out one side is worse than the other. Speakers give you both ears at once and add limits of their own: most laptop and phone speakers produce almost nothing above 15 kHz, so a low result becomes a fact about the speaker. Wired headphones are the safest choice, over-ear or in-ear. If you want to know whether it's your ears or your gear, the Speaker Test walks each channel of a setup separately.

Question 7

Can I test each ear separately?

Accepted Answer

That's how the test runs by default: every frequency goes to one ear, then the other. The comparison is the interesting part. Losing the top of your range is normal and gradual, and both ears usually do it together. One ear noticeably behind the other is the thing you can't feel day to day, and it's the one result here worth acting on. If the gap is still there when you test again on another day, mention it to a doctor.

Question 8

Why did the test play nothing that time?

Accepted Answer

Because roughly one turn in five is silent on purpose. When you're straining for a tone you're expecting, it's genuinely easy to hear one that wasn't there, and a test with no silent turns has no way to tell that apart from real hearing. Answer yes to a silent turn and you'll be told, and you can rerun that frequency. It isn't a reprimand: it happens to almost everyone at least once, especially near the top of the range.

Question 9

What does the chart mean?

Accepted Answer

The hearing test chart puts frequency along the bottom, low on the left and high on the right, and level down the side. A point further down means the tone had to be louder before you caught it. Circles are your right ear, crosses your left, and a downward arrow means no response even at the loudest level this test will produce. Switch on the overlay to drop everyday sounds onto the chart, and on a full test the band ordinary speech occupies with them: consonants like s, f and th sit high and quiet, which is why a dip on the right-hand side of the chart shows up first as everyone else mumbling.

Question 10

How accurate is this compared to a test at an audiologist?

Accepted Answer

Not as accurate, and the gap is mostly calibration and the room. An audiologist uses an audiometer calibrated to a known output, headphones with a known response, and a booth quiet enough that your own threshold is what limits the result. Here, the calibration step, where you use your own hands rubbing together as a 65 dB reference, gets the vertical axis roughly into place, to within maybe 10 dB. Background noise in your room raises your apparent thresholds at the low end whether you notice it or not. Two things survive all of that: the shape of the curve, and the difference between your two ears.

Question 11

Can this tell me whether I have hearing loss?

Accepted Answer

No, and it won't pretend to. It reports which tones you responded to and at what level, and it never returns a verdict. What is worth an appointment: hearing that drops suddenly, one ear clearly worse than the other, ringing that doesn't settle, pain, or discharge. Sudden loss in one ear is treated as urgent, and treatment works far better in the first days than in the first months.

Question 12

Why did a hearing test video give me a different result?

Accepted Answer

Streamed video audio is lossily compressed, and that compression throws away the top of the frequency range first, usually somewhere around 16 kHz. So a video claiming to test you to 20 kHz is often playing nothing at all up there, and “it stopped at 16” is the codec rather than your ears. A tone generated in your browser has nothing between the oscillator and your headphones, which is why the number you get here can be higher.

Question 13

Why can I hear a sound frequency test on my phone but not on my laptop?

Accepted Answer

Different output hardware, and up high the differences are enormous. A phone driving decent earbuds will push a clean 18 kHz; a laptop's built-in speakers are physically tiny and usually give up between 14 and 16 kHz whatever the file contains. Sample rate plays a part too: a device running at 44.1 kHz can only represent frequencies up to about 22 kHz at all, and output filters start rolling things off well before that. If two devices disagree, run the same sound frequency test on both with the same wired headphones and see whether they still do.

Question 14

What is the quiet hissing or fluttering I hear instead of a clean tone?

Accepted Answer

Usually aliasing or intermodulation: your equipment producing frequencies that were never in the signal. When a very high tone is played back at a sample rate too low to carry it, or a small driver is pushed past what it can do cleanly, the difference comes out as a lower, audible artefact. You really are hearing something, but it isn't the test tone, and answering yes to it flatters your result. If a tone sounds like fluttering rather than a steady pitch, treat it as not heard. Tones here are generated live at your device's own sample rate, which removes the resampling version of this problem entirely.

Question 15

Are my results saved or uploaded anywhere?

Accepted Answer

Not unless you press save, and even then they go no further than this browser's storage on this device. This tool doesn't even have a server to upload to: every tone is generated in your browser and every threshold is worked out there. Delete removes saved results completely, and a share link carries the result in the part of the URL that browsers never send to a server.

Question 16

Can I compare a new result with an old one?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Saved results appear in a list under the test, on this device. Press Compare on one and it's drawn on the chart behind your current result, so a change reads as two lines pulling apart rather than two numbers you have to hold in your head. Hearing shifts over years, not weeks, so a useful comparison is months apart, with the same headphones, in a similarly quiet room.

Question 17

Can I find the frequency of my tinnitus here?

Accepted Answer

This isn't the tool for it. This test looks for the quietest tone you can still hear at each frequency, which is a different question from matching a tone to a sound you already hear. For that, the Tone Generator lets you slide a tone up and down until it sits on top of what you're hearing, then note the number. Tinnitus that's new, one-sided, or getting worse is worth an appointment either way.

Question 18

How loud should I set my volume?

Accepted Answer

Loud enough that the 1 kHz tone in the sound check is comfortably present, and no louder. Every tone is capped well below anything uncomfortable, with a tighter cap above 8 kHz, so turning the system volume up past that point mostly buys you your room's background noise. That noise matters more than you'd expect: traffic and fans mask the low end and push your apparent thresholds up. The Decibel Meter will tell you how loud the room actually is.

Question 19

Does this work on my phone?

Accepted Answer

Yes, on iOS and Android in any modern browser. One thing to know on an iPhone: the silent switch on the side mutes browser audio, so if nothing at all comes through in the sound check, look there first. Wired headphones through an adapter give you a better result at the top of the range than Bluetooth does.

Highest frequency heard	Typical age
20 kHz and above	Under 20
19 kHz and above	Under 25
18 kHz and above	Under 30
17 kHz and above	Under 35
16 kHz and above	Under 40
15 kHz and above	Under 50
14 kHz and above	Under 55
12 kHz and above	Under 60
10 kHz and above	Under 70
Below 10 kHz	70 and over

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