Musicians and hearing aid design--is your hearing instrument being overworked?

Abstract

Music can have sound levels that are in excess of the capability of most modern digital hearing aids to transduce sound without significant distortion. One innovation is to use a hearing aid microphone that is less sensitive to some of the lower frequency intense components of music, thereby providing the analog-to-digital (A/D) converter with an input that is within its optimal operating region. The "missing" low-frequency information can still enter through an unoccluded earmold as unamplified sound and be part of the entire music listening experience. Technical issues with this alternative microphone configuration include an increase in the internal noise floor of the hearing aid, but with judicious use of expansion, the noise floor can significantly be reduced. Other issues relate to fittings where significant low-frequency amplification is also required, but this type of fitting can be optimized in the fitting software by adding amplification after the A/D bottle neck.