The Effects of Signal to Noise Ratio, T60 , Wide-Dynamic Range Compression Speed, and Digital Noise Reduction in a Virtual Restaurant Setting.
Gregory M Ellis, Jeff Crukley, Pamela E Souza
PMID 38254265WHAT IT FOUND
For hearing aid users, fast-acting compression worked best when digital noise reduction was turned on.
Slow-acting compression worked best when noise reduction was off. Turning noise reduction on with slow compression made speech understanding worse. Room reverberation also lowered scores.
Key findings
01Listeners with hearing impairment understood speech better when fast-acting compression was paired with noise reduction on (66.0% correct) compared to noise reduction off (59.8% correct).
02Listeners with hearing impairment understood speech worse when slow-acting compression was paired with noise reduction on (56.3% correct) compared to noise reduction off (66.0% correct).
03Speech understanding was better in the less reverberant room setting (76.6% correct) than in the more reverberant setting (71.9% correct).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used a simulated restaurant environment rather than real-world testing. Listeners with hearing loss were tested remotely at home, while listeners with normal hearing were tested in a sound booth, which may have influenced the results. The hearing aid simulator used a single frequency response shape for all participants rather than individualized gain. The differences in performance between the best and worst settings were small (approximately 6% to 9%).
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Extramural).
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that digital noise reduction always improves speech understanding. The study found that noise reduction made performance worse when paired with slow-acting compression, and the overall differences between settings were small.