Short answer: SoundGym is worth it if you want the widest set of mixing ear games in one place and a leaderboard that guilts you into showing up. It is not worth it if you’re expecting to be taught something, or if you assumed the free plan would grow as you go. It doesn’t. Free accounts get the same three games on every workout, permanently.
At $142 a year it is the most expensive ear training that isn’t a full course. That can still be the right call for some people. Here’s the arithmetic, out loud, so you can decide. All prices checked August 2026.
What does SoundGym cost?
Three prices sit on their shop page: $24.95 a month, $142 a year, or $495 for lifetime access.
The annual plan gets marketed as “$11.80/month”, which is just $142 divided by twelve. The saving is real though — twelve monthly payments come to $299.40, so paying up front cuts the bill roughly in half.
The price has moved. Sound On Sound’s review in July 2021 quoted $24.95 a month and $119 a year. Five years on, monthly is identical and the annual plan has gone from $119 to $142. Lifetime at $495 is about three and a half years of annual payments, so it only makes sense if you’re genuinely still opening it in 2030.
What do you get without paying?
Three games, and they don’t rotate. SoundGym’s own help pages say free accounts “get the same 3 games on each workout”, while Pro accounts get all the games with five per workout. On beat workouts, free gets one game and Pro gets three.
This is the thing people get wrong. It isn’t a trial that expands, and it isn’t a limited number of sessions per day that resets into something better. It’s a fixed sample of the product, offered indefinitely. We broke the whole split down in SoundGym free vs Pro.
You also get the free Audio School: five programs covering recording, electronic production, mix and mastering, synthesis and live sound. SoundGym describes it as “curated from the best free online content” — so it’s organised third-party video rather than original teaching. That’s a fair thing to offer for nothing, and it’s honestly labelled.
Does SoundGym teach you, or just measure you?
Mostly it measures. You get a target, you guess, you’re told right or wrong, your score moves. What you usually don’t get is an explanation of what you should have been listening for.
You don’t have to take our word for it — the sharpest version of this criticism sits on SoundGym’s own public feedback thread, where a user wrote that “SoundGym games are about measurement not training”. The SoundGym team replied defending the gamified design as deliberate, which is a legitimate position. A gym doesn’t explain anatomy to you either. Just know which of the two things you’re buying.
Sound On Sound flagged related issues in 2021: the games can feel repetitive once the competitive push wears off, and because settings are randomly generated the difficulty is uneven — an EQ move is much easier to hear on a busy synth than on a sparse drum loop. Their reverb results also swung noticeably between headphones and speakers.
How many games are there?
Eighteen are listed by name, while the shop page says “all 21 sound games”. We’re reporting the gap as what it is rather than guessing at the missing three.
The named ones: Sonar Beast, EQ Mirror, Compressionist, Stereohead, Balance Memory, EQ Knight, Peak Master, Dr. Compressor, DB King, Filter Expert, Kit Cut, PanGirl, Bass Detective, Delay Control, Distorted Reality, Reverb Wizard, EQ Cheetah and Feedback Eliminator.
That is a lot of ground — EQ, compression, stereo, level, filters, delay, distortion, reverb, feedback. Breadth is the honest strength here, and no free tool covers all of that in one login.
One practical catch: there’s no native mobile app. SoundGym’s help page states there are no iOS or Android applications, so on a phone you’re using the mobile browser. If your plan was “train on the commute”, test that before you pay for a year.
A year of SoundGym vs everything else
Here is what $142 buys you elsewhere. Three-year cost is included because ear training is a habit, not a weekend.
| Tool | Price | Cost over 3 years | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| SoundGym Pro (annual) | $142/year | $426 | 18+ mixing games, leaderboard, no mobile app |
| SoundGym lifetime | $495 once | $495 | Same, if you’re sure about the habit |
| TrainYourEars EQ Edition 2 | EUR 49 once | EUR 49 | Deep EQ drilling on your own music. Desktop standalone only — no plugin version |
| Quiztones | $19.99 once (macOS) | $19.99 | 450+ EQ quizzes. Apple platforms only |
| EQ Academy | Free | Free | 100 levels of frequency, gain, Q and mid/side. macOS and Windows app |
| Bedroom Producer (Patron) | $2.50/month | $90 | Browser mix trainer on real multitracks, adaptive difficulty |
| Monosounds Ear Training (ours, so weigh that) | Free | Free | 500 levels, 54 exercise generators, browser, phone or desktop |
Read that column again. One year of SoundGym is nearly three times TrainYourEars, which is a one-time EUR 49 licence you keep. It’s seven times Quiztones. And two of the rows cost nothing at all.
That doesn’t make SoundGym a rip-off. It makes it a subscription, and subscriptions are only worth it while you’re using them. If you train four times a week, $142 is fine. If you train in a burst every March, you’re renting a leaderboard.
What we built instead, and where it loses
Full disclosure: we make a competing trainer, so judge this paragraph accordingly. Monosounds Ear Training is free and stays free — no card, no tier that unlocks better exercises. It runs in the browser on a phone or desktop, has 500 levels across 10 chapters, and the first 10 need no account.
Under the hood there are 54 exercise generators in six answer formats: multiple choice, a slider you match by ear, quiz questions, ABX, ranking three clips, and a “fix it” mode with two knobs where the correct values make the audio identical to the reference. It covers EQ, resonance hunting, compression, gain, panning, width, mono compatibility, phase and comb filtering, saturation, reverb, filters, synthesis by ear, plus a quiz on 32 classic hardware units. When you miss, you get a hint describing what that range actually sounds like. The audio comes from our own sample packs — real stems and full mixes, the same material as our free Serum 2 preset pack and our Serum 2 bundles.
Where it loses to SoundGym: SoundGym has been around far longer, claims 500,000+ members (their number, not ours), and that population is what makes its leaderboard mean something. Ours is a game, not a curriculum — there’s no video teaching, and being browser-only means no offline app. If those matter to you, SoundGym is the more established product and we’ll say so.
Buy it if / skip it if
Buy SoundGym if:
- Competition genuinely motivates you. The daily workout and the leaderboard are the product’s real engine.
- You want breadth in one place — reverb, delay, distortion, stereo and feedback drills, not just EQ.
- You’re mixing regularly and $12 a month is noise next to your plugin spend.
- You already tried the free three games and found yourself wanting the other fifteen.
Skip SoundGym if:
- You want to be taught. It scores you; it rarely explains. A course or a trainer with hints will serve you better.
- Your main gap is EQ specifically. TrainYourEars at EUR 49 once, or free EQ Academy, cover that narrower target for a fraction of the money.
- You train on your phone. There’s no native app.
- You’re not sure you’ll keep the habit. Start with something free, prove the habit, then pay.
- Budget is genuinely tight. There’s more free tooling than most people realise — we catalogued it in our guide to free ear training for producers.
If you’re still weighing it against the field, we compared the whole landscape in our SoundGym alternatives roundup. And if you just want to start tonight without a decision, ten levels of ours need no account.
FAQ
How much does SoundGym cost?
SoundGym Pro costs $24.95 per month, $142 per year, or $495 for a lifetime licence, as listed on their shop page in August 2026. The annual plan is advertised as “$11.80/month”, which is the yearly price divided by twelve. Twelve individual monthly payments would total $299.40, so the annual plan is roughly half price.
Is SoundGym free?
There is a permanently free account, but it is not a trial that expands. Free users get the same three games on every workout, and one game on beat workouts, according to SoundGym’s own help pages. Pro users get all games with five per workout, or three on beat workouts. The free Audio School programs are also available without paying.
Is SoundGym worth $142 a year?
It’s worth it if you train several times a week and the leaderboard keeps you consistent, because no free tool matches its breadth of games in one place. It’s not worth it if you want explanations rather than scores, or if your gap is only EQ — a one-time EUR 49 licence for TrainYourEars or the free EQ Academy covers that for far less over three years.
Does SoundGym actually improve your hearing?
Regular structured listening does sharpen your judgement, and SoundGym’s daily workout format is built to keep that regular. The common complaint is that it grades you without telling you what to listen for, so improvement comes from repetition rather than instruction. If you learn better with feedback, pick a tool that explains your misses.
Does SoundGym have a mobile app?
No. SoundGym’s help page states there are no iOS or Android applications. You can open it in a mobile browser, but there’s no native app to install, and no offline mode. Test it on your phone before buying a year if commute training was the plan.
Is SoundGym lifetime access a good deal?
At $495 it equals about three and a half years of the $142 annual plan, so it pays off only if you’re still training on the platform after that point. Most people don’t keep a single training habit that long. Paying yearly and cancelling when you stop is the lower-risk option unless you’re already several years in.
I run Monosounds.studio and make the packs myself. Ten-plus years of producing, 97+ releases, 16,000+ downloads. Every Serum 2 preset we ship passes a CPU check on a mid-range laptop and gets used in a real track before release. If it does not survive a mix, it does not go in the pack.
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