Preferred Compression Speed for Speech and Music and Its Relationship to Sensitivity to Temporal Fine Structure.
Brian C J Moore, Aleksander Sęk
PMID 27604778WHAT IT FOUND
Preferred compression speed varied.
Slow was slightly preferred overall, but five of 22 clearly preferred fast for speech. Slow may be a safe default for music. For speech, test preferences or intelligibility individually.
Key findings
01On average, slow compression was preferred over fast, by 0.46 scale units for speech and 0.55 scale units for music.
02Individual preferences varied: for speech, 10 subjects preferred slow by 0.5 scale units or more, and 5 subjects preferred fast by 0.5 scale units or more.
03Poorer sensitivity to temporal fine structure was weakly associated with greater preference for slow compression.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only 22 subjects were tested, all aged 56 to 87 years with moderate-to-severe hearing loss, so the findings may not apply to younger people or people with milder losses. The hearing aid was simulated offline and not a real hearing aid, so exact clinical performance may differ. Preference judgments were made monaurally, so they may not represent bilateral hearing aid use. The main outcome was sound-quality preference, not measured speech intelligibility or hearing aid success. Fast and slow conditions used different maximum compression ratios, which could complicate interpretation, although output level differences were generally small. Six subjects could not complete the low-frequency interaural phase task, and the adaptive-frequency interaural phase test did not correlate with preferences, so the link to temporal fine structure was weak and inconsistent.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that slow compression improves speech understanding or is best for all patients. The study measured preference with a simulated hearing aid, found only a slight average preference for slow, and five of 22 subjects clearly preferred fast for speech.