A personal hearing profile
      A hearing assessment is fast and completely painless. When it’s over your hearing abilities will be captured on paper, on what is professionally             referred to as an audiogram.

When you think about hearing. what do you actually perceive? Perhaps the easiest way to imagine it is in terms of loudness. A person with normal hearing should be able to hear very quiet sounds, find it easy to hear medium-strength sounds. and be able to tolerate very loud sounds.
Generally, sounds can be described as high-pitched or low-pitched, with various intensity levels. In speech. The a soft consonant sounds like `t', 's' and `f are higher pitched than the strong vowel sounds like `a', , `e' and `i'. And if you have difficulty differentiating between these sounds, you will have difficulty understanding what is being said. In which case it might be time to get your hearing tested.

The hearing assessment and audiogram
A standard hearing assessment is not at all traumatic. You sit in a comfortable sound booth, put on same headphones and listen. You listen to all sorts of pure tones. from the deep bass tones to the high, treble tones. You listen to them because most everyday environmental sounds and speech are situated in this range of frequencies. And you confirm that you have heard each sound either by raising a hand or pressing a response button.
The hearing care professional will then begin to decrease the volume of the sounds, to determine where it becomes difficult for you to hear. This boundary is called the hearing threshold. These levels am then recorded on a simple graph showing X's and O's, whom X is your left ear and O is your right. For each ear it shows how loud a given tone needs to be in order for you to hear it.
The next step is to evaluate how well you understand speech. You might be asked to listen to and repeat a series of two-syllable words, like `ice cream', which are played at quieter and quieter intensity levels. This helps to determine your threshold for recognizing speech. The same is done with monosyllabic words, like 'dog'. From these tests the hearing care professional can calculate a percentage of 'word discrimination' for each ear. If necessary, other tests can be performed to evaluate how wall you can understand speech in difficult or noisy situations.

At the end of the procedure it will be time to determine whether Deltas are appropriate for you.

Age-induced hearing loss
The most common type of hearing loss is called presbycusis, or age-induced hearing loss. This is caused by a gradual deterioration of hair cells, which is part of the normal ageing process. The degree to which hair cell loss occurs varies from one individual to another. Some people experience a significant loss of sensory calls at the age of 50, while others only have a negligible loss even at the age of 80. Hearing problems associated with presbytcusis can be significantly reduced with Delta.

 Noise-induced hearing loss
Another, less common type of hearing loss is noise induced, arising from an acoustic trauma or from exposure to excessive noise for extended periods of time. This causes damage to both the inner and outer hair cells of the cochlea. People with noise-induced hearing loss typically have difficulty hearing high frequency sounds, but hear quite well in the low frequencies. Delta is an ideal solution for noise induced hearing loss.