Fitting a Wide Dynamic Range of Speech into a Narrow Dynamic Range of Hearing

range—from below the normal threshold of hearing to above the normal level of discomfort or even pain. Most of the time, people with normal hearing can arrange things so that sounds are between their threshold and discomfort levels. This becomes difficult to achieve for people with hearing loss; the difficulty in achieving it increases with the size of the loss. There is an obvious need for hearing aids to employ some form or forms of dynamic range compression to make as many sounds as possible audible and comfortable. This problem is commonly viewed in the following way, although it is not necessarily laid out in these discrete steps: