Two people can run the same screening at the same system volume and hear meaningfully different sound levels, purely because of their headphones. This is the biggest accuracy limit in any consumer hearing test — including ours.
Headphones differ in sensitivity and in how they couple to the ear. A sealed in-ear tip delivers noticeably more level at the eardrum than an open-fit earbud driven by the same signal, and frequency response varies between models on top of that.
Without a correction, that difference lands directly in your thresholds: the same ears can look several decibels better or worse depending only on what is on your head.
They are approximate offsets based on published third-party measurements of how these headphones respond, not on our own coupler or artificial-ear measurements. Fit style matters a great deal — an in-canal seal reads louder than an open earbud — and individual fit varies from person to person.
We state this plainly because it would be easy to imply a level of calibration we do not have. Treat the corrections as accurate to roughly ±5 dB, and even that is not a guarantee.
If your model is not in the list, the screening still works and is still useful. Absolute thresholds may be off by several decibels, but relative tracking — comparing today's screening with your own earlier ones on the same hardware — remains informative, because the unknown offset is roughly constant across your sessions.
The one thing to avoid is switching headphones or system volume between screenings and then reading meaning into the change.
Hearing thresholds and decibels
What a threshold is, what the numbers mean, and how precise they are.
How online hearing tests work
What a browser-based screening can and cannot measure, step by step.
Bayesian adaptive hearing testing
The adaptive algorithm behind a four-minute screening, in full detail.
The science behind Audiomaxxer
Methods, evidence, limitations and academic references in one place.