This investigation compared monaural and binaural hearing aid preferences of 15 adults with mild-to-moderately-severe bilaterally symmetrical sensorineural hearing losses. Subjects listened to connected discourse in quiet and background noise at 70 and 80 dB SPL with K-Amp, linear Class D, linear output limiting compression (OLC), Manhattan II, and linear asymmetrical peak clipping circuits (AP...

Human bilateral cochlear implant users do poorly on tasks involving interaural time differences (ITD), a cue that provides important benefits to the normal hearing, especially in challenging acoustic environments, yet the precision of neural ITD coding in acutely deafened, bilaterally implanted cats is essentially normal (Smith and Delgutte, 2007a). One explanation for this discrepancy is that ...

The masking-level difference (MLD) was measured in a group of adult listeners having unilateral otosclerosis before stapedectomy surgery, 1 month following surgery, and 1 year following surgery. The results indicated that the MLD in this group improved significantly over each of the sequential tests. In contrast, for a group of normal-hearing listeners, the MLD did not change significantly over...

In studies investigating binaural processing in human listeners, relatively long and task-dependent time constants of a binaural window ranging from 10 ms to 250 ms have been observed. Such time constants are often thought to reflect "binaural sluggishness." In this study, the effect of binaural sluggishness on binaural unmasking of speech in stationary speech-shaped noise is investigated in 10...

2000. In the past 10 years, the binaural penetration rate has improved 13 points to 68%. Since 1994, we have seen both slight increases in BTE usage as well as significant increases in “invisible” ITC hearing instruments. Since the previous MarkeTrak survey, programmable/DSP technology has grown from 13% to 28% of hearing instrument sales, according to the survey, while instruments without volu...

Noise reduction algorithms in hearing aids are crucial to improve speech understanding in background noise for hearing-impaired persons. For binaural hearing aids multi-microphone algorithms, exploiting signals from both the left and the right hearing aid, are considered to be promising techniques for noise reduction, because in addition to spectral information spatial sound information can be ...