After a hearing test you're handed a chart full of lines, circles and X's, the audiogram. It looks technical, but it's readable in about two minutes once you know the trick.
The two axes
- Left to right: pitch (frequency), from low sounds like a bass drum or a man's voice (250 Hz) up to high sounds like birdsong and the consonants s, f and th (8,000 Hz).
- Top to bottom: volume (decibels), but flipped from what you'd expect. The top of the chart is soft; the further down a mark sits, the louder that pitch had to be before you heard it.
Each mark answers one question: "How loud did this pitch need to be for you to just barely hear it?" Marks near the top mean normal hearing at that pitch. Marks lower down mean hearing loss there. Circles (O) are usually your right ear, X's your left.
The degrees of hearing loss
Providers group thresholds into ranges. Roughly:
- 0–25 dB, normal
- 26–40 dB, mild: soft speech and conversation in noise get difficult
- 41–55 dB, moderate: you miss much of normal conversation without help
- 56–70 dB, moderately severe: loud, clear speech needed
- 71–90 dB, severe and 90+ dB, profound: speech is largely inaudible without amplification
Most age- and noise-related loss slopes downward to the right, better in the lows, worse in the highs. That's exactly why people say "I hear, but I can't make out the words": vowels (low pitch) come through while consonants (high pitch) vanish.
The speech tests
Your appointment likely also included word recognition, repeating words at comfortable volume, which shows how clearly your ears deliver speech to your brain, something the tone chart alone can't capture. Learn more about what our hearing tests involve.
Want your own chart explained line by line? We never hand you paper and wish you luck, book a hearing evaluation and we'll walk through the whole thing together.