What is a Hearing Test?

1. Otoscopy

Before any testing begins, we examine your ears using an otoscope to identify anything that might interfere with sound transmission. This includes checking for earwax buildup, foreign objects, or structural abnormalities that could affect your hearing. Our audiologists are skilled in safe ear wax removal using advanced techniques when necessary.

2. Pure Tone Air Conduction Testing

This is the part most people recognize as a "hearing test." You'll sit in a soundproof booth wearing headphones or insert earphones, responding when you hear tones at different frequencies and volumes. Air conduction testing measures how loud sounds need to be before you can barely detect them as they travel through your outer ear, middle ear, and inner ear.

3. Pure Tone Bone Conduction Testing

Instead of sending sound through your entire auditory system, bone conduction testing uses a small device placed on your head to send vibrations directly to your inner ear. This bypasses your outer and middle ear entirely, helping us determine whether hearing loss originates from your outer/middle ear or your inner ear.

4. Tympanometry

When we find differences between air and bone conduction results, tympanometry helps us understand why. This test measures how your eardrum moves when we change air pressure in your ear canal. It can detect fluid in the middle ear, eardrum perforations, or other conditions that may require medical treatment.

5. Speech Reception Threshold Testing

Pure tone testing tells us about your ability to detect sounds, but hearing and understanding are different processes. Speech reception threshold testing uses two-syllable words presented at decreasing volumes to identify the softest level at which you can hear and understand speech. This helps us understand your difficulty with soft talkers.

6. Word Recognition Score Testing

This test presents single-syllable words at a comfortable listening level to evaluate how clearly you understand speech when it's loud enough to hear easily. Even if you can detect sounds normally, you may still have difficulty understanding what's being said. This test helps us identify speech clarity issues.

7. Speech-in-Noise Testing

Your ability to understand speech in quiet environments doesn't predict how well you'll hear in noisy situations. Speech-in-noise testing presents sentences with increasing background noise to determine how much separation you need between speech and noise to understand conversations in challenging environments like restaurants.

8. Tinnitus Pitch and Intensity Matching

If you experience tinnitus (ringing or buzzing in your ears), we can measure its characteristics through pitch and intensity matching. This helps us understand the frequency and loudness of your tinnitus, which is valuable information for developing treatment strategies.