DeviceBenchFree online hearing range test
Hearing test that finds the highest pitch still reaching you
The ladder starts at 125 Hz and climbs one rung at a time; you say whether each tone still arrives, and the last one that did is your upper limit, reported with the age band that limit is usually quoted for. The number belongs to three things at once — your ears, your headphones and your sound card — and most consumer headphones are already rolling off before 18 kHz, so a run that ends at 16 kHz may be measuring the driver rather than you. This is a range check and not an audiogram: a real one measures each ear separately, at a calibrated level, in a treated room.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 20 rungs to 20 kHz
- One fixed level
- Left and right separately
What this number is, before you write it down
The rung you stop at belongs to three things at once: your ears, the headphones on them and the sound card driving those headphones. Most consumer headphones are already rolling off before 18 kHz, so a run that ends at 16 kHz may be measuring the driver rather than you. And this is not an audiogram — an audiogram finds the quietest level each ear can detect at a calibrated reference, one ear at a time, in a treated room. This finds the highest pitch that reaches you at one fixed level in whatever room you are sitting in.
Start here. The number you get is the better ear.
- 125 Hz
- 250 Hz
- 500 Hz
- 1 kHz
- 2 kHz
- 3 kHz
- 4 kHz
- 6 kHz
- 8 kHz
- 10 kHz
- 11 kHz
- 12 kHz
- 13 kHz
- 14 kHz
- 15 kHz
- 16 kHz
- 17 kHz
- 18 kHz
- 19 kHz
- 20 kHz
Set your system volume on the first few rungs, where every pair of headphones is honest, and then do not touch it again — the level is held at -14 dBFS inside the page precisely so that the only variable left is the frequency.
Two things reliably ruin a run and neither is your hearing. Bluetooth headphones re-encode everything, and several codecs simply discard the top of the band before it ever reaches the driver — wired is the only honest way to do this. And a room with a fan or a fridge in it masks the quietest rungs, which is why a repeat run at night often lands one rung higher than the same ears managed in the afternoon.
How to run the hearing range ladder
Three rules, and the first one decides whether the other two mean anything.
Wire up, quieten down, and set the volume on the low rungs
Use headphones with a cable. Set your system volume while the ladder is still down at 125 and 250 Hz, where every pair of headphones on earth is honest, and then leave the dial alone for the rest of the run — the page holds its own output at one level precisely so that the volume knob is not part of the answer. A fan or a fridge in the room will mask the quiet rungs, and running the same ladder in a silent room often lands one rung higher.
Answer each rung, and replay the ones you are unsure about
Each rung sounds for three seconds. Press the higher button only when you actually heard something, not when you think you should have — the top of the ladder is where people talk themselves into a tone, and a result you argued yourself into is worth nothing. Play it again as often as you like, and step back a rung if you want to confirm one you have already passed.
Stop at the first silence and read the two numbers
The last rung you confirmed is your upper limit, and the one above it is the first that did not arrive; the boundary is somewhere between them and this ladder is deliberately too coarse to say where. Then run the left ear and the right ear separately and compare. A small gap between the two is ordinary. A large one, or one that appeared suddenly, is the finding worth taking to a person rather than a page.
Technical specifications
| Rungs | 20 — the nine audiometric frequencies from 125 Hz to 8 kHz, then 1 kHz steps up to 20 kHz |
|---|---|
| Level | Fixed at -14 dBFS on every rung; the page cannot read or set your system volume, and says so |
| Tone length | 3 seconds per rung, replayable as often as you like |
| Ear selection | Both, left only or right only, using a stereo pan of ±1 for true channel isolation |
| Result | Highest rung confirmed, the rung above it that vanished, and the age band the limit is usually quoted for |
| Resolution near the top | 1 kHz, so a real limit of 16.4 kHz reports as 16 kHz — the boundary is between two rungs, not on one |
| What is being measured | Ears, headphones and sound card as one chain; a browser can calibrate none of the three |
| What is kept | Nothing between reloads — the plain-text copy is the only record that survives |
Frequently asked questions
I stop at 14 kHz. Is something wrong with my ears?
Almost certainly not — that is the ordinary shape of an adult ear. The top of the range goes first and it goes early, because the hair cells that respond to the highest frequencies sit at the entrance of the cochlea and take every sound that enters on their way past. Nothing in speech or music has a fundamental above 5 kHz, so the loss is genuinely undetectable in daily life; people notice it only as cymbals sounding slightly duller than they remember.
My left ear reaches 16 kHz and my right only 14 kHz. Does that matter?
Check the equipment before you check yourself. Two rungs of difference is very often the headphones: an unequal seal, an earcup pushed further onto the ear, or one driver that has aged differently after years of use. Swap the cups left-to-right and run it again — if the gap follows the headphones, it was never your ears. If it stays with the ear, and especially if it appeared over weeks rather than years, that asymmetry is the one result on this page worth an appointment.
Can I do this with wireless earbuds?
No, and the reason is the codec rather than the earbuds. Bluetooth cannot carry an uncompressed stream, so everything is re-encoded on the way out, and the standard codec spends its bits where the music is and discards the top of the band before the driver ever sees it. A run on wireless earbuds tends to stop between 14 and 16 kHz no matter whose ears are in them, which is a measurement of the encoder.
Does turning the volume up move my result?
Yes, usually by one rung, and that is exactly why the level is fixed inside the page. Hearing is a threshold rather than a switch: a tone you cannot hear at one level becomes audible at a higher one, so an unconstrained volume control turns the test into a measurement of how far you turned the dial. The page cannot see or set your system volume, which is the honest limit here — the fixed part is the digital level leaving the browser, not the sound pressure arriving at your ear.
Why does the ladder start at 125 Hz instead of 20 Hz?
Because the bottom of the range is not where the information is, and it is not measurable through headphones anyway. The first nine rungs here are the standard pure-tone audiometry set, which starts at 125 Hz for the same reason: below that, the room, the seal and the chair start contributing more than the ear does. If the low end is what you came to test, that job needs a speaker rather than a threshold, and it belongs on the bass page.
The 20 kHz rung is silent for everyone I have tried. Is it actually playing?
It is playing, and two separate ceilings usually stand in front of it. Most headphones are already several decibels down by 18 kHz and falling fast, so the top rung often does not survive the driver. Beyond that, the number of adults who hear 20 kHz under any conditions is very small; the textbook figure is a description of a healthy newborn, not of a typical listener. Reaching 17 or 18 kHz on decent wired headphones is an unusually good result.
Is this the same as a hearing test at a clinic?
No, and the difference is not a detail. An audiogram measures the quietest level each ear can detect, one ear at a time, at nine frequencies from 125 Hz to 8 kHz, against a calibrated reference in a treated room, with the other ear masked so it cannot answer on its behalf. It reports decibels of threshold, not a top frequency. This page reports the highest pitch that reaches you at one arbitrary level through equipment nobody has calibrated — useful for comparing two pairs of headphones or two runs of your own, and useless as a diagnosis.
About frequency range, the age curve, and what an audiogram does instead
The nine rungs below 10 kHz on this ladder are not an arbitrary set: 125, 250, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 6,000 and 8,000 Hz are the frequencies clinical pure-tone audiometry uses, and a clinic stops at 8 kHz because that is where speech stops. Every vowel, every consonant and every cue that separates an f from an s lives underneath it, so a threshold measured up there predicts whether someone will follow a conversation in a busy room. Everything above 8 kHz on this page is extended high-frequency territory, tested routinely by almost nobody, and it is where the interesting number is — not because it matters for hearing speech, but because it is the first part of the range to go and therefore the most sensitive record of what a life has cost your ears.
The age curve behind the result comes from presbycusis, the ordinary top-down loss that begins in the twenties. The cochlea is laid out by frequency, with the cells that respond to the highest pitches sitting closest to the entrance, so they absorb every loud event on its way in and wear first. That is why the limits stack the way they do: around 19 to 20 kHz in the late teens, 17 kHz in the twenties, 15 kHz by fifty, and it keeps descending. Those figures are population medians for undamaged ears, which is a weaker claim than it sounds — noise exposure moves an individual far more than a decade of age does, and someone who spent five years in front of a stage can land two decades below their birthday. Nothing here can separate the two causes.
What breaks a run is almost never the ears. Wireless anything is disqualifying, room noise costs a rung, and a headphone driver that is already down 6 dB at 17 kHz will stop the ladder there regardless of who is wearing it — which is worth knowing before you conclude anything, and which is also what makes this page a decent way to compare two pairs of headphones by running the same ears through both. If you want to check the other end of the range, the bass test sweeps downward until a speaker gives up; if you want to drive one frequency by hand rather than climb a fixed ladder, the tone generator lets you sit on any pitch indefinitely. And if the first rung produced nothing at all, the problem is upstream of your hearing entirely — the sound test confirms audio is leaving the machine, and the headphone test confirms both cups are working before you blame the ears inside them.
What happens to the answers you give
Every number on this page is worked out by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading it in. Nothing you type, paste or open is uploaded, logged or kept, which is also why the tools carry on working after you disconnect from the network.
Each rung is generated in the tab and each answer is a number in memory. There is no account, no history and no comparison against other visitors, so a result exists only for as long as the page is open — copy it if you want to hold a run against a later one, because a reload leaves nothing behind to compare with.