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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Binaural Loudness Squelch

Studies have reported that listening with two ears is better than listening with one, especially in binaural understanding of speech in a noisy environment. This binaural advantage is believed to arise from a combination of head diffraction, redundancy, and binaural squelch effects. Head diffraction has been discussed previously, and binaural redundancy is being reserved for a future post. This post

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Localization: More Important Than Word Recognition?

Sound Localization – Time-of-Arrival Differences at the Ears Time-of-arrival of sound at the two ears is an important contributor to sound localization. In this continuation of a series on binaural hearing, special attention is given to the second major contributor to sound localization, that of time-of-arrival of the sound at the two ears. Last week’s post on localization featured interaural

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How Important Is Sound Localization?

Part II of a Series on the Use of Two Ears for Hearing In a recent post, I wrote about hearing with two ears, and listed the following among the major phenomena involved: Head shadow effect Sound localization Loudness squelch Facilitation in noise (masking level difference) Binaural summation Collectively, these phenomena result in at least the following practical advantages of

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Whisper Test for Hearing Loss and Hearing Aids – Still Alive?

It is Amazing What One Can Find About Hearing Aids When Looking For Something Else In her post last week on the HHTM blog, Gael Hannan commented on the “whisper game” that hearing-impaired individuals are not particularly good at, and provided an accurate and entertaining commentary as to why this is. She reported that some family physicians use the whispered

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Hearing with Both Ears – Binaural Hearing 101

Hearing With Two Ears Binaural Hearing. “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak” (Epictetus the Stoic). These may be wishful thoughts relative to wisdom, but near the truth relative to psychoacoustics. The auditory system maximizes slight differences in time (and phase), intensity, and spectral composition between acoustic stimuli arriving

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My Hearing Aid Battery Doesn’t Last Long

My Hearing Aid Battery Doesn’t Last Long, So What Can be Happening? My post last week suggested that when advanced hearing aid features are activated (adaptive noise cancellation, adaptive directionality, etc.), while they seemed to have essentially no significant impact on hearing aid delay performance, these feature activations do have an impact on the current drain. And, current drain determines hearing

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Hearing Aid Delay: What Does the Data Say?

Hearing Aid Delay – What the Data Tells Us In a recent post related to hearing aid delay, I reported that what I had found suggested that current digital hearing aids had delays that were considered acceptable, being less than about 10 msec. But, since the data reported was taken a number of years ago, I commented that I had found

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Do Hearing Aids Meet ANSI Standards?

Measuring a hearing aid to ANSI (American National Standards Institute) Standards should be a first step before any programming of the hearing aid is attempted. While it is assumed that the hearing aids meet ANSI Standards, as measured and sent by the manufacturer, confirmation of the hearing aid’s basic foundation is necessary to ensure that the eventual programming of the

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Hearing Aid Analyzers…Factory Floor Testing as a Start

by George J. Frye, M.Eng. and Wayne J. Staab, Ph.D. George Frye founded Frye Electronics, Inc., in 1973, where he designed the FONIX 5000, the first automatic digital hearing aid analyzer. Later work included the 6500, the first interactive real time analyzer. He lately helped with the design of the FONIX Colt, which is the first type 1A clinical audiometer to

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Hearing Aid Delay

Hearing Aid Delay Between Direct and Processed Sound Last week’s post provided information about the delay between the direct and processed sound in digital hearing aids – hearing aid delay. All hearing aids, but especially digital, have processing delays and it has been speculated that these delays may potentially interfere with amplified sound quality of speech. Depending on the amount of delay,