The test is conducted in a sound booth using either a pair of foam inserts or supraural headphones connected to an external audiometer.

[citation needed] The availability of stereo headphones and smartphones or tablets equipped with sound reproduction systems led to the appearance of new audiologic diagnostic methods which help people identify their degree of hearing loss without assistance.

Hearing thresholds, like with traditional audiometry, and with a special application, are determined on a standard set of frequencies from 125 Hz to 8 kHz.

Also, an application can be integrated with a function for testing the relevance of perception of separate sounds and figures of intelligibility[clarification needed] in various acoustic conditions.

The test measures signal-to-noise ratio for the different conditions which corresponds to how loud the sentences needed to be played above the noise so that the patient can repeat them correctly 50% of the time.

[3] The Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) is defined in the American National Standard ANSI S3.2 Methods for Measuring the Intelligibility of Speech Over Communication Systems.

[8] The method consists of 50 sets of six monosyllabic words that differ in initial or final consonant (e.g. not, tot, got, pot, hot, lot or ray, raze, rate, rave, rake, race).

The MRT has been extensively used by the US Air Force to test the performance of different communication systems, which often include a noise interference component.