Widex Fitting Rationale: A Need for a Change?

Widex has for a long time used a default prescription which, for speech signals, is similar to NAL-NL1. In the current paper, this default prescription is compared to an alternative prescription with more NAL-NL2-like characteristics. The research was prompted by the introduction of a new hearing aid, UNIQUE.2 Some of the implemented features in the new hearing aid change the output from the hearing aid (compared to previous Widex models) in particular sound environments. For example, the Soft-Level Noise Reduction reduces soft unmodulated noise, while preserving gain for soft modulated sounds. While developing the new hearing aid, and in light of recent prescription changes, it was judged important to evaluate our default gain prescription with regard to speech intelligibility and sound quality.