Quantification of significant sound quality attributes in the context of hearing instrument fine tuning

For a successful hearing instrument fitting, it is essential to meet three categories of auditory criteria: loudness/audibility, speech intelligi-bility and sound quality. Audibility and loud-ness are quantified by pure tone audiometry and loudness scaling. For measuring speech intelligibility a range of different procedures are available for both aided and unaided testing conditions. A method to quantify sound quality issues during the hearing instrument fitting is still being developed. Contributions to this issue have been made by Gabrielson et al. (1990) and Geers & Haubold (1993). The studies reported in this paper have been conducted by the research group of O. Heller, Würzburg, and are published for the first time in Boretzki et al. (1997a), Boretzki et al.