Making sure you get the information you need to make good decisions about your hearing health is our mission.  We do that through a series of painles tests in our state of the art Sound Booth.  They take about 30 mins.

Pure Tone Audiometry - We test the tones needed to hear the world particularly speech.  This test tells us which tones you hear and which tones you do not hear at a normal level.  This is the foundation of prescriptive fitting of hearing aids.

Bone Conduction - This test checks to see if you have a conductive loss or a sensori-neural loss.  Meaning is it in your middle ear (which may be medically correctable) or is the problem in your choclea (nerves).  95% of hearing losses are due to "nerve deafness" and are not medically treatable.  Digital hearing aids are specifically designed to only add the the tones that you are missing.  For example, you may hear Bass tones normal but not hear Soft, Treble tones.  This would cause you to hear words but not understand them because you may be missing the important letters and sounds in words like "s", "f", "th", and "sh".

Most Comfortable Level - This test determines what volume of speech is most comforatable for you.

Uncomfortable Level - This test determines what volume you find uncomfortablly loud. Some people have a condition called "Recruitment".  This is an abnormal sensitivity to loud volumes. It is important to know this when we fit your hearing aids.  It can make the difference between success or failure.

Word Recognition - If we find you have hearing loss, we need to know the condition of the speech processing in your brain.  To do this we call out words at a level that you can hear clearly and get a score of your ability to understand speech in quiet with hearing aids.  This is important, it gives us an indication of how well you will perform with hearing aids before you even wear them.

Quick SIN - This test gives us a score of how well you can hear in noise with and without hearing aids.  We present sentences for you to repeat in various levels of noise. Normal scores are 0-3 and the worst score is 26.  People who get a 20 or above will have trouble hearing in noise, even with the best hearing aids.  This is information you need to know before you purchase hearing aids.  We have found this test invaluable in counseling and making recommendations to our patients. We have found that even mild hearing loss over an extended period of time will cause deterioration in the brain's ability to score normal with hearing aids on this test.  The sooner you start treating hearing loss with hearing aids, the better.

Tympanometry - This is a quick, painless pressure test of each ear to determine if there are any middle ear problems that require a referral to your medical doctor.

Video Otoscopy - We have the latest camera for your ears! You will see what we see. This tells us whether there are any abnormalites in your ear canal or ear drum that require medical treatement.

REM (Real Ear Measurement) - We have the latest REM equipment to fit your hearing aids with prescriptive formulas. If you have not had hearing aids fit this way, you are missing out! Without using real ear measurement there is no way to know if the hearing aid is sending the correct sounds and the correct levels once inside your ear. Any other method is a guess. We are experts at using REM fitting equipment.