Hearing loss typically develops slowly, making it challenging to determine when a hearing test might be beneficial. At Northeast Hearing Solutions, we offer comprehensive hearing tests to assess your auditory health and recommend the right solutions for your needs. These tests help identify any hearing loss, as well as the severity of the issue, and provide essential information for crafting personalized care recommendations, if necessary. We’re confident we can help you get on the path to better hearing, whether that means establishing a baseline or finding the appropriate technology for your condition.

What Kind of Hearing Tests Will Be Done?

There are several types of hearing tests we may recommend. It can vary based on your age, the symptoms that brought you to us and your history with hearing loss. With this information, we will put together a series of evaluations to better help us understand your degree of hearing loss and what frequencies and pitches you’re struggling to hear. Some of the most common hearing tests include:

Pure-tone testing: Pure-tone testing is a fundamental component of a hearing assessment that measures the ability to hear different frequencies. During the test, the individual wears headphones and responds to tones played at various pitches. This helps identify the softest tones a person can hear at different frequencies, establishing the threshold of their hearing sensitivity across the audible spectrum. The results provide valuable insights into the overall range and extent of any hearing loss.
Bone conduction: Bone conduction testing assesses the hearing ability by transmitting sound directly to the inner ear through bone vibrations, bypassing the outer and middle ear. A small device is placed behind the ear, delivering vibrations to the skull. By measuring the response to these bone-conducted sounds, the test helps determine if hearing loss is originating from the outer or middle ear or if it is related to inner ear or nerve issues. This aids in diagnosing specific types of hearing loss and guiding appropriate intervention strategies.
Speech testing: Speech testing evaluates an individual’s ability to hear and understand speech. Various speech stimuli, such as words or sentences, are presented at different volumes to assess the hearing threshold for speech sounds. This test goes beyond detecting hearing loss by examining how well someone comprehends spoken language. By gauging speech recognition in both quiet and noisy environments, speech testing provides crucial information for tailoring interventions, like hearing aids or assistive devices, to enhance communication abilities.

We also use speech reception threshold (SRT) testing. This is how we verify the results we got from your pure-tone test. It involves playing words or speech in a headset so we can determine the lowest levels of sound you can clearly identify them at across different frequencies.

Hearing Tests for Children

Traditional hearing tests require some input from the patient. This can be problematic for children and some other patients who may not be able to provide accurate answers to our questions during testing. It’s one reason why we offer special diagnostic evaluations for children. These are designed to give us the information we need without input from the child and help to keep them comfortable during the testing process.

Other Tests

Finally, your hearing specialist may also recommend other forms of testing, depending on the results we get from our initial evaluation. This may include an otoscopy, which is a physical examination of the ear, as well as a tympanometry, which determines the health of the ear canal and middle ear.

Discussing Your Results

The hearing testing part of your appointment should take about 30-40 minutes to complete. After that, you’ll have the chance to sit down with your hearing instrument specialist to discuss your results, hear their care plan recommendations and ask questions. You may want to bring a family member with you to make sure you retain all of the information you get and ask all of the questions you want to.