Hearing Age Test

What is actually coming out of your speakers

The signal chain, end to end

The ladder is ten tones — 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 kHz. Coarse two-kilohertz jumps at the bottom, then single steps from 14 upwards, where the interesting part happens. Each one is a pure sine wave generated live by a single Web Audio oscillator. There are no sound files, so nothing is downloaded and nothing is buffered; the same oscillator is created once and reused for the whole run, with its frequency changed rather than restarted.

Level is the part worth knowing about. One gain stage sits between the oscillator and your output, resting at effectively silence and ramping to a fixed peak of 0.06 — roughly six per cent of full scale. That figure never changes: every tone is played at exactly the same amplitude as the one before it, so nothing is quietly boosted to help you reach the top. The level changes are ramped over a few milliseconds and the frequency is only switched while the gain is at the floor, which is not politeness. An abrupt start or a hard frequency jump makes a click, and a click is broadband — it carries energy right across the spectrum, which would let you "hear" a 19 kHz tone that you cannot actually hear. Fading removes the tell. A 1 kHz reference tone is offered first so you can set a comfortable volume, and any tone left running silences itself after eight seconds, or the moment you switch tabs.

Nothing is recorded. The page plays sound and never listens: there is no microphone request anywhere in the code, no getUserMedia, no capture of any kind. The test also saves nothing — no result, no history, no setting is written to your browser, so a reload wipes your answer completely. The only outside requests the page makes are the site's web font and its ad script, and neither of them is told what you tapped.

Why your equipment answers this question, not your ears

High-frequency roll-off is the gradual fall in output that a speaker or headphone shows as the frequency climbs past what its driver can usefully move. It is a slope rather than a wall, and above it a tone can be perfectly present in the signal and simply not arrive at your ear. Small drivers roll off early and steeply, so most laptop and phone speakers are fading long before 20 kHz, and plenty of cheap earbuds are no better. Wireless earbuds add a second squeeze: the audio is compressed before it reaches the driver, and the extreme top of the range is the first thing a lossy codec spends. Then there is the digital ceiling — at a 44.1 kHz output rate the highest frequency representable at all is a shade over 22 kHz, so a 20 kHz tone is pressed right against the limit of the system carrying it.

So a "failed" 18 kHz says very little on its own, and the likeliest explanation is the speaker rather than the ear. That is also why saying "I can't hear it" at the very first 8 kHz step sends you to a setup-check screen instead of a result: that answer almost always means the volume is down, the device is muted, or the output cannot reproduce these frequencies at all.

Before you take the number seriously

This is a party trick. It is not an audiogram, and it cannot detect hearing loss.

A real hearing test looks nothing like this. It is carried out in a sound-treated room on calibrated equipment and tests each ear separately, and instead of asking a yes-or-no question at one fixed volume it finds the quietest level you can just detect at each of a range of frequencies, plotted against established norms. It is usually paired with speech testing and interpreted by a professional who knows your history.

This page does none of that. One fixed level, both ears at once, uncalibrated hardware, you as the judge — and it never plays anything below 8 kHz, which is above where ordinary conversation lives, so the whole region where hearing difficulty usually shows up first is outside what we play at all. A good score here is not evidence that your hearing is fine, and a poor one is not evidence that anything is wrong. If you have a genuine concern — muffled speech, ringing, one ear behaving differently from the other, trouble following conversation in a noisy room — book an appointment with an audiologist or your doctor. That is a test; this is a bar bet.

The other two quick tests here carry the same warning for the same reason: whatever hardware sits between you and the browser gets measured along with you. The reaction time test reads your monitor's refresh rate and your mouse as much as your reflexes, and the colour hue test reads your screen. All three are worth doing once and comparing against yourself, not against anybody else.