RP201 - Acoustic Consequences of an Adaptive Directional Microphone, Noise Reduction, and Split Processing

Abstract: The current study investigated objectively the effects of an adaptive directional microphone, digital noise reduction, and split processing technology on the overall level, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measured at the hearing aid output. The output level of the hearing aid has implications on audibility and listening comfort, whereas the output SNR can be an important variable in aided speech-in-noise perception. Based on the behavioral findings, where split processing technology was reported to improve the speech intelligibility and noise tolerance, we hypothesized that such technology would improve the output SNR over traditional single stream based hearing aid processing.