Hearing Range Test

This is not a hearing test in the medical sense. It cannot diagnose anything. Your speakers and headphones are uncalibrated, your surroundings are not a sound booth, and the result depends at least as much on your equipment as on your ears. If you are worried about your hearing, see an audiologist — they have the equipment to measure it properly, and this page does not.

With that said: this steps up through sixteen frequencies, from 125 Hz to 20 kHz. Play each one, say whether you can hear it, and the run ends at the first tone you cannot.

Set your volume before you start, and leave it there. Raising the level as you climb will tell you where your speakers give out, not where your hearing does — and high frequencies can be much louder than they sound.

What the result means

It means you heard a tone at that frequency, through those speakers, in that room, at that volume. That is genuinely useful information, and it is also all of it. A result is not an audiogram: a real hearing test measures the quietest level you can detect at each frequency, using calibrated transducers in a controlled environment, and produces a curve. This produces one number, from equipment nobody has measured.

The single most common reason for a low result here is the equipment. Laptop speakers, phone earpieces and cheap earbuds often roll off sharply above 12-15 kHz, so the tone simply is not being produced. If your result surprises you, repeat it with a different pair of headphones before drawing any conclusion.

Range and age

Textbook human hearing spans roughly 20 Hz to 20 kHz, but that top figure describes healthy young ears and almost nobody keeps it. The high end declines gradually and universally with age — a process called presbycusis — and it is normal. A rough guide: many people under 20 can hear 17-18 kHz or above, by the thirties 15-16 kHz is common, by the forties and fifties 12-14 kHz, and beyond that lower still. These are wide, overlapping ranges, not thresholds, and someone landing outside them is not thereby unusual.

For what that decade-by-decade decline actually looks like in published audiometric data, and why 20 kHz was only ever a young person's ceiling, see Hearing Range by Age.

The 17.4 kHz step has a name: the mosquito tone. It was used in devices intended to be audible to teenagers and inaudible to adults, and later as a phone ringtone for exactly the opposite reason. If you can hear it, you are in a minority of adults — and if you cannot, that is the ordinary case rather than a finding.

Losing the top of the range matters far less for everyday listening than people expect. Speech lives mostly between 250 Hz and 6 kHz, and musical fundamentals almost entirely below 5 kHz. What sits above 15 kHz is air, sheen, and cymbal shimmer. Their absence is a change in texture, not in intelligibility.

Why headphones give a truer answer

Room acoustics interfere strongly at high frequencies. A tone from a speaker reaches your ears both directly and after bouncing off desk, walls and screen, and those reflections can cancel each other at the frequency you are testing — a genuine null that has nothing to do with your ears. Move your head ten centimetres and the answer changes. Headphones remove the room from the equation, which is why every real hearing test uses them.

Equally: test one thing at a time. If a tone seems to vanish, try turning your head slightly before deciding you cannot hear it, and be honest with yourself about the difference between hearing a tone and expecting to. At the top of the range, the temptation to answer yes to silence is strong.

Where equipment and ears fail together

Above about 15 kHz, three things are giving out at once: the driver's ability to reproduce the tone, the room's ability to deliver it, and the ear's sensitivity to it. There is no way to tell from a browser which of the three ended your run, and any page that tells you otherwise is guessing. This is also why the verdict here describes a range and stops: the honest statement is "you heard up to here, on this equipment", and everything past that would be invention.

If you want a number that means something clinically, an audiologist can give you one in about twenty minutes. If you want to know whether your headphones are working, whether one ear is behaving differently from the other, or roughly where your top end sits — this is fine for that, which is what it is for.

Not sure where the problem is? Run the full sound check: six quick questions, and one summary that points you at the right tool.