Judge equipment against the same four requirements in F20, noting which of them the equipment itself has to satisfy. Two belong to the audiometer: it must meet the specifications OSHA references in 1910.95(h), and it must hold calibration — a functional check before each day’s use, and acoustic calibration at least annually. The third, a test environment inside Appendix D limits, is a property of the room rather than the instrument. OSHA requires the room be measured with a Type 2 sound level meter and a Class II octave-band filter set; it says nothing about what device does the measuring. A standalone monitor satisfies it. So does an audiometer that measures continuously while the test runs — the practical difference is whether you hold a single reading from before the test or evidence that the room stayed in range for the whole of every test. The fourth, recordkeeping, is the one whose consequences show up years later.
Beyond the compliance floor, the differences are workflow: whether test settings are centrally controlled or configured per device, whether results are available immediately or after a handoff, and whether records land in one system or several. SHOEBOX PureTest is FDA-listed and a Type 4 audiometer as defined by ANSI/ASA S3.6-2025. Test protocols are pushed centrally so every site tests identically; ambient noise is monitored continuously rather than sampled once; testing and threshold shift analysis run offline, so connectivity never blocks a test; multiple testing modes cover automated and assisted workflows; and every result lands in the SHOEBOX Data Management Portal with its test conditions attached.
