👂Hearing test

No. An audiogram plots the quietest level you can detect at each of several fixed frequencies, in decibels of hearing level, using equipment calibrated so that those decibels mean the same thing in every clinic. This page has none of that: it cannot know what sound pressure leaves your headphones, so it measures the top of your range rather than your threshold. Different question, different instrument, and the two results are not interchangeable.

They measure the ear itself instead of asking you. An otoacoustic emissions test plays a sound and records the faint sound the healthy inner ear sends back; an auditory brainstem response test records the nerve’s electrical answer through electrodes on the scalp. Neither needs the person to press a button, which is why both are used with newborns and with anyone who cannot reliably report what they heard — and why neither has a browser equivalent.

They are repeatable rather than accurate, and the difference matters. Run one twice on the same headphones in the same room and the results will broadly agree, which makes the change over time meaningful; run it on three devices and you will get three answers, because every device has its own roll-off and every room its own noise floor. Treat any online result as a prompt to investigate, never as a measurement of your ears.

The textbook figure is 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and it describes a young ear in ideal conditions rather than a typical one. Sensitivity at the top declines gradually through adult life in most people, so an adult hearing to somewhere in the mid teens of kHz is unremarkable. The bottom of the range is far more stable, and below roughly 30 Hz the sensation moves from hearing toward feeling — one reason the low end deserves its own test.

Headphones, with two advantages. They put the sound directly at each ear, so left and right can be judged separately instead of averaged across a room, and they sidestep the reflections and background noise that mask quiet high tones. Avoid a wireless headset with its microphone open: the mono voice profile it switches to cuts everything above roughly 8 kHz, which caps the result long before your hearing does.

Here, it means one of three things and this test cannot tell you which: an asymmetry in the headphones, an asymmetry in how they sit, or an asymmetry in you. Swap the left and right cups around and repeat — if the difference follows the hardware, it was the hardware. If it stays with the same ear on more than one set of headphones, that is the one result on this page worth taking somewhere with calibrated equipment, because a browser cannot answer it.