Speech sounds
Where conversational speech sits at 60 dB SPL, about what reaches you from someone talking a meter (3 feet) away.1 Farther away or quieter, it all moves up the chart. Sounds below the line are loud enough to hear, and sounds above it are too quiet.
Audible dots
Killion and Mueller’s count-the-dots audiogram:2 100 dots for conversational speech, placed by how much each pitch and loudness adds to understanding it. The dots below the better ear’s line are audible.
They made it as a counseling tool, to show how much of speech is audible with and without hearing aids. The count isn’t a test score or a hearing aid recommendation.
The A marks
A marks estimate thresholds with hearing aids fitted to DSL v5's targets,3 for the speech this chart shows at 60 dB SPL: the loss the aid is fitted to, less the gain it gives that speech. Because the aids compress, softer sounds get more gain and louder ones less. Real fittings often fall short of their targets, and these are not a measured aided audiogram.
See hearing aids for how the aids are fitted.
Sources
-
C. L. Hillis, R. M. Uchanski, and L. S. Davidson, "Common sounds audiograms: quantitative analyses and recommendations," Seminars in Hearing 44, suppl. 1 (2023): S49–S63. ↩
-
M. C. Killion and H. G. Mueller, "Twenty years later: a NEW Count-The-Dots method," The Hearing Journal 63, no. 1 (2010): 10–17. ↩
-
S. Scollie et al., "The desired sensation level multistage input/output algorithm," Trends in Amplification 9, no. 4 (2005): 159–197. ↩