This is just a prerelease version. If you find this software somewhere, don't use it seriously!



INTRODUCTION:




REQUIREMENTS:

- A high quality soundcard with a headphone jack, or a headphone amp attached to line out.

- High quality headphones. Please don't take the test with speakers!

- Qt 2.x (from www.trolltech.com or from your Linux distribution)

- libao (from www.xiph.org)



USAGE:

At the beginning you're presented with some questions. Please answer them. 
Then the application window appears. You see a coordinate system that later will display the data the program generates from your input. You don't have to understand what you see, it's just for feedback and for those who know somethiong about psychoacoustics or want to know more about it.
To begin the test press the START button. You basically navigate through the whole procedure by pressing the START button. Each time you press it, somthing happens (in most cases you'll hear a sound), and you'll see a question right above the buttons. Please answer the question by pressing either the YES or the NO button. If you can't make up your mind you can press START as many times as you want. The progam will make exactly the same sound each time, until you press YES or NO.

The whole test is divided into several parts.

Part 1: 
Measures your threshold of hearing with pure tones. This is used to determine how loud your headphones and soundcard deliver sound to your ears at different frequencies (needed for part 3). Note that you may not hear anything the first few times, depending on how well your headphones reproduce low frequencies.

Part 2:
Same as part 1, but with noise.

Part 3:
By far the largest part. You'll hear sounds and you'll be asked if you can hear changes in the sounds. This is used to determine how loud a sound can be to be inaudible in the presence of another sound (i.e. the amount of masking).