[How badly does the "normal-hearing" young man of 1992 hear in the high frequency range?].

In the course of a clinical study we examined young men believed to have normal hearing. Volunteers with a positive history for noise deafness were excluded from further study. Normal hearing was verified by pure-tone audiometry if the hearing loss did not exceed 15 dB for each test tone between 250 Hz and 8000 Hz. As this limit is far below normative threshold values (DIN ISO 7029) we expected to find a large number of otological normal subjects. Using pure-tone audiometry, ABR and noise exposure, we found that 65% of the young male volunteers (mean age 25 years) did not meet the criteria for audiologic normality. The pure-tone thresholds for these subjects were comparable to the expected levels of their fathers' generation.