PTA TEST

You enter a special soundproof metal room. You wear headphones and are instructed to raise your hand when you hear a tone. Tones (steady or beeping) are played at six different pitches, representing the range of human hearing. Each time you raise your hand, the volume is dropped 10 decibels (dB) until you can no longer hear it. The test is repeated in the other ear.

You remove the headphones and put on a headband with a small plastic rectangle that fits behind your ear and conducts sound to your bone. The tones are repeated. If either ear tests poorly with earphones but normally with the bone-conduction piece, crossover (the good ear “helping out” the poor ear) is suspected.

The good ear will then be covered with a headphone, background masking noise played, and the test resumed. To test your ability to discern speech, you will put on the earphones again and listen to and repeat 25 common words.

In order to identify the configuration of a hearing loss, PTA offers ear-specific thresholds and uses frequency-specific pure tones to produce location-specific responses. The air-bone ga can also be used to determine the type of loss because PTA employs both air and bone conduction audiometry.