Online Hearing Test
Test the range of frequencies you can hear, from deep bass to high treble — a rough indication only, and explicitly not a hearing assessment.
🎧 Use headphones and a moderate volume. Start quiet and turn up slowly — never to an uncomfortable level.
Can you hear this tone?
For fun only — not a medical test. Results depend on your gear and volume.
The 17 tones are two ladders joined end to end
From 60 Hz to 8 kHz the tones double each time. That is how an audiologist lays out a chart, because pitch is heard as a ratio rather than a difference. Above 8 kHz the spacing changes completely.
| Section | Steps | Octaves covered | Ratio per step |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60 Hz to 8 kHz | 7 | 7.1 | 2.0× (doubling) |
| 8 kHz to 20 kHz | 9 | 1.3 | 1.05–1.25× |
More than half the test lives in 16% of the range, and the steps get finer as they climb — the last one, from 19 kHz to 20 kHz, is a ratio of 1.05 against 2.1 for the first.
That is deliberate rather than sloppy. Age-related hearing loss arrives from the top down and moves quickly, so a coarse ladder up there would put a decade of change between two adjacent steps. The fine spacing is exactly where the resolution is needed.
And the age bands are not even either
The highest tone you can hear gets mapped to an age range, and those ranges are narrow at the top and wide at the bottom.
| Highest tone heard | Age band | Years covered |
|---|---|---|
| 19 kHz and up | under 20 | open-ended |
| 17 kHz | 20–24 | 5 |
| 16 kHz | 25–30 | 6 |
| 15 kHz | 30–39 | 10 |
| 14 kHz | 40–49 | 10 |
| 12 kHz | 50–59 | 10 |
| 10 kHz | 60+ | open-ended |
Two thousand hertz at the top of the scale separates a twenty-year-old from a twenty-five-year-old. The same two thousand at the bottom covers everyone past sixty. Of the 5 closed bands, the narrowest is 5 years and the widest 10.
The mapping is a rough curve fitted to a population, not a measurement of anybody. It is worth knowing which end of it is doing the guessing. Below 10 kHz it stops guessing altogether — 8 of the 17 tones return "check your setup" rather than an age, because being unable to hear a 1 kHz tone is a fault in the equipment or the volume, not a fact about your ears.
The thing most likely to be wrong is not your ears
Ordinary headphones and every laptop speaker roll off before 20 kHz, some well before. A tone you cannot hear at 18 kHz may simply never have been produced, and there is no way for a web page to tell the difference between a speaker that did not play it and an ear that did not catch it.
Which makes the top of this test a test of the equipment at least as much as of the listener. The lower steps, where every speaker is honest, are the ones worth trusting — and they are also the ones that matter for hearing speech.
Two more things worth knowing before reading anything into a result: a very high tone played loudly is not good for the ears it is measuring, so the volume wants to be modest; and a real audiogram measures the quietest level you can hear at each frequency, not merely whether you can hear it at all. This is a screen, not a diagnosis.
How to use
- Use headphones in a quiet room.
- Set the volume to a comfortable level and leave it there.
- Note the highest frequency you can still hear.
- See an audiologist for anything you are concerned about.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a real hearing test?
No, and it cannot be. A clinical audiogram uses calibrated equipment in a sound-treated booth and measures the quietest level you can detect at each frequency. This plays tones through unknown headphones in an unknown room at an unknown level, which measures your equipment as much as your ears.
What is the normal hearing range?
Roughly 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz for a young person with undamaged hearing. The upper limit falls steadily with age — this is presbycusis, and losing the top of the range through your twenties and thirties is entirely normal rather than a sign of damage.
Why can I not hear the highest tones?
Most likely age, which is expected and universal. It may also be your headphones or speakers, since many reproduce the extreme top end poorly or not at all. A failure at 18 kilohertz says as much about the equipment as about you.
Does the frequency range matter for everyday hearing?
Less than people assume. Speech occupies roughly 250 hertz to 8 kilohertz, so the extreme top end matters little for conversation. Difficulty following speech in a noisy room is a far more meaningful warning sign than losing the highest tones.
What are the real warning signs?
Struggling to follow conversation in background noise, turning volume up more than others need, ringing in the ears, or asking people to repeat themselves frequently. Any of those warrant a proper assessment regardless of what a browser test says.
Can hearing loss be prevented?
Noise-induced loss largely can be, and it is permanent once done. Hearing protection at concerts and around power tools, keeping headphone volume moderate, and limiting time at high levels all work. Age-related loss happens anyway, which is a reason to protect what you have.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged, or stored.