Month: August 2009

Enhancing Temporal Resolution and Sound Quality: A Novel Approach to Compression

For more than a decade, hearing loss has been recognized as the loss of a fast-acting compression mechanism. Likewise, existing technology has been recognized as being slow for effective compensation. Bernafon’s ChannelFree system has been designed to tackle this problem, offering effective compression for consecutive phonemes in speech, while taking the necessary steps to preserve sound quality.

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Developments in Auditory Steady-State Responses (ASSR): 2009

ASSR has multiple applications with regard to hearing screenings and diagnostic audiology. The ASSR facilitates a rapid and statistically valid estimate of hearing thresholds, and can add significant threshold information while evaluating patients unable or unwilling to participate in behavioral tests. Recent findings and new developments with regard to ASSR stimulus, software-based algorithms, and hardware solutions are addressed.

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Is the Hearing Instrument to Blame When Things Get Really Noisy?

This study suggests that more than 80% of both aided hearing-impaired and normal-hearing mature adults experience loudness discomfort in real life—despite the aided population being fitted with acceptable/conservative gain and output levels. While it is important to ensure that hearing instruments do not cause loudness discomfort, it may be impossible to completely avoid experiences of infrequent loudness discomfort without compromising the sound quality of speech.

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