The level ladder and pre-listen

Fifteen games adapt to you on a ladder of eight levels. Each level sets how hard the question is — a smaller boost, a narrower bell, finer knob steps, less time — and, in the EQ games, how much you may hear your own move while you place it. The card on the dashboard shows Level 5 / 8 instead of a mastery bar, with "on" and the device name when you have named one (see Listening devices and phone-speaker mode).

Which games use the ladder

The other modules keep the fixed difficulty tiers and a mastery bar.

How you move

• Up: two answers in a row with 80 points or more take you up one level.
• Down: one answer with 0 points takes you down one level. "I don't know" counts as 0.
• Hold: a 50-point answer keeps the level, and the count of two starts again.

The ladder looks at the question's own points (100, 80, 50 or 0) before any pre-listen factor, so an answer at level 1 can still take you up. The ladder settles where about seven answers in ten reach 80 points: hard enough to learn from, not so hard that it stops being fun.

The difficulty only caps the ladder

The difficulty picker on the dashboard sets how high you can climb:

Intermediate unlocks at 50 correct answers in total, Advanced at 150. If you switch to a lower difficulty, you play at its top level; the level you reached is kept, and switching back finds it again. A miss while capped steps down from the level you were playing.

A game you have not played yet starts at level 1. One exception: if you already have EQ answers, the four EQ games start at the level of your difficulty — level 1 at Beginner, 3 at Intermediate, 5 at Advanced — so a trained ear is not sent back to +12 dB boosts.

Pre-listen: hear your own move

In the four EQ games, pre-listen lets you hear your guess while you place it: the stem plays through your own filter, at the same type and gain as the question. The A/B button becomes a three-way switch — Original, Question and Yours. You match what you hear instead of guessing blind, and the help fades as you climb:

After a 0-point answer, the next question gives one listen back (×0.85), whatever the level. The line under the switch tells you how many listens are left; with none left it reads "No listens left — trust your ears."

The match games count their drawn aid the same way. In Compressor match and the Delay, Reverb, Saturation and Gate match games, levels 1–2 draw both the Target and Yours (×0.5), levels 3–4 draw only Yours (×0.85), and from level 5 there is no picture (×1.0). The quick drills and EQ Characters have no aid: their points always count in full.

What counts as correct

Only an answer without pre-listen or a drawn aid can count as exact. So only those count toward the correct answers that unlock Intermediate, Advanced and the Ring-Out Simulator, and only those take the 🙈 Blind ×1.5 bonus in the EQ games at Advanced. Answers with help still raise your score, your mastery and your level.

One ladder per listening device

Each game keeps its level per listening device. Your EQ level on studio headphones and on a phone speaker are two different numbers, so a hard day on a small speaker never pulls down your headphone level. Before you name a device, levels are kept in one shared slot; the first device you name takes them over. Levels sync with your account. See Listening devices and phone-speaker mode.