Wayne Staab

Dr. Staab is an internationally recognized authority in hearing aids. As President of Dr. Wayne J. Staab and Associates, he is engaged in consulting, research, development, manufacturing, education, and marketing projects related to hearing. His professional career has included University teaching, hearing clinic work, hearing aid company management and sales, and extensive work with engineering in developing and bringing new technology and products to the discipline of hearing. This varied background allows him to couple manufacturing and business with the science of acoustics to bring innovative developments and insights to our discipline. Dr. Staab has authored numerous books, chapters, and articles related to hearing aids and their fitting, and is an internationally-requested presenter. He is a past President and past Executive Director of the American Auditory Society and a retired Fellow of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology. Interests engaged in outside of the above include: fishing, hunting, hiking, mountain biking, golf, travel, tennis, softball, lecturing, sporting clays, 4-wheeling, archery, swimming, guitar, computers, and photography. These are great topics of discussion away from business.

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Knee, Typewriter, and Hearing Aid

Prior to the holidays, this post offered a suggestion that a much larger market exists for amplification products (aka hearing aids) if they are viewed as a consumer product rather than as a product identified only with hearing loss. The number of “consumers” greatly exceeds the number of “patients” – normally, a critical factor in sales. For those who wish

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Hearing Aid Protective Practices May Be Underutilized

This week’s post reports on the results of a short, informal survey conducted by Lana M. Joseph, M.S. that sought to determine, in part, some options hearing aid offices offer to manage security and protection for their patients’ hearing aids. She received her Master’s degree in Health Care Management from the University of New Orleans. She realizes that in no way is

Readers’ Choice 2014: Hearing but Not Understanding

Dear Readers: During this holiday season, the editors at Hearing Health & Technology Matters (HHTM) are taking some time off. However, we are not leaving you without anything to read on our blog this week. Instead, we are publishing a special holiday edition filled with what we call our Readers’ Choices. HHTM has had more than half a million

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Call Them Customers

Call Them Customers My last three posts may have caused some anxiety among professional hearing aid dispensers, especially when they read the obituary of the hearing aid. Some readers of this post may think these comments are extreme. I ask readers to read this with their minds, not their emotions or from biased perspectives. This post intends to focus on the

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Hearing Aid Market Penetration

Is There a Real Percentage Change in Hearing Aid Market Penetration rates? This week’s post continues a discussion of hearing aid market penetration. This was not the intended topic, but after reading last week’s presentation, some readers challenged Figure 1 of that post, even though the overall message was not challenged – that market penetration is not as good as

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Hearing Aid Obituary – Continued

Is the problem of limited hearing aid usage that of the consumer or the system? Last week’s post reported on the death of the hearing aid as we have known the device from the past. The hearing aid obituary post suggested that, in spite of its passing, its legacy could be expected to live and actually expand via a

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Hearing Aid Obituary

Note: This Obituary is written somewhat with tongue in cheek, but history tells us to beware of what we do not know or expect. This is the first of a series of posts on “the Hearing Aid Obituary.” The series is a theoretical treatise attempting to project amplification (actually listening) directions moving forward. Obituary Some time around 2014, the hearing

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Hearing Loss: Aging, Medication, Cognition, Treatment

ADA: A Bad Day at Black Rock or A Good Day at Red Rock? Many years ago Spencer Tracy starred in a film as Macreedy, a one-armed man who came by train to the sparsely populated and isolated desert town of Black Rock in the Southwest United States. It was the first time in four years that the train had stopped.

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Before the Audiogram

Audiogram, AW’-dee-oh-gram”, (n). A record of the threshold of sensitivity of hearing measured at several different (usually discrete) frequencies{{1}}[[1]]Modified slightly from Delk, J.H. Comprehensive Dictionary of Audiology, P 35, 1973, The Hearing Aid Journal, Sioux City, IA[[1]]. Strange as it may seem to many currently measuring and recording hearing results, the audiogram did not always portray hearing sensitivity as logically

Featured image for “Receiver, Speaker, Output Transducer, or Driver?”

Receiver, Speaker, Output Transducer, or Driver?

Which is it? Take your pick? This is a question that has been asked of me many times over the years. Is the component that converts the hearing aid amplified signal back to an acoustic signal properly called a receiver, speaker, loudspeaker, output transducer, driver, or even other names (Figure 1)? Or, can each of these terms be used interchangeably?