Many people with hearing loss first notice their difficulty in hearing when trying to follow conversations in noisy places like cafes and restaurants. Standard tone tests do not assess hearing in such situations.
Why Tone Tests Are Not Enough
A pure-tone audiogram assesses a person’s ability to detect a number of quiet tones of varying frequency. The results from such a test can give an indication of how loud a number of different sounds need to be for an individual to detect them, but give no indication of how well they can manage to hear speech in the presence of background noise. This is the situation for most people’s normal means of listening to speech.
What a Speech-in-Noise Test Involves
During the speech in noise test the audiologist will play recorded speech (words or sentences) amidst background noise such as babble, other voices, or even a mock up of a busy café or restaurant. You then repeat what you have heard. The level of background noise is adjusted until you can just barely understand the speech. This is known as the signal-to-noise ratio or the “-gap”.
What the Results Show
These scores are compared to that of people of a similar age to your own. The results can highlight that even if your pure tone results are within normal limits your auditory system may have problems in filtering out unwanted competing sounds. How background noise affects people with hearing loss is often not recognised until it has been specially measured as part of your hearing test.
What Happens Next
The results can highlight whether a hearing aid with built-in directional microphones or a remote microphone system would be of benefit to you.
Hearing Test Cheltenham is covered in more detail at https://www.imperialhearing.com/audiologist-near-me/cheltenham.
Noisy rooms are usually noisy for everyone with hearing loss, so tone tests will not reveal any problems in these situations.