I took the test just now and got the expected result: "slightly below normal range" in both ears (expected, based on previous tests that show somewhat worse than typical hearing for my 61-year age).
It would be great if there was better quantification of the result, like
dB of SNR degradation relative to normal, rather than just "slightly
below normal range". Charles, is there a numeric range associated
with these words?
It does seem like a pretty effective test of hearing in noise. I presume it's doing an adaptive SNR process, since it would usually give me a relatively easy one after each one where I was pretty much guessing.
What I'd like to understand better is exactly how the mechanisms causing threshold elevation also cause degradation of SNR threshold. I presume that the auditory filter bandwidths are wider, and the compression less, with hearing loss. But they're also wider at high levels, and high levels don't cause a degraded SNR threshold, do they? Or maybe they do, in normal hearing, at levels high enough to cause this much bandwidth widening?
I've definitely been feeling a degraded ability to deal with conversation in noisy environments (cafes and such), which I understand is correlated with absolute threshold elevation. I'm just not clear on why it's so correlated. Is it understood? Is there a good paper on this?
Dick