Hear The Music

When fitting musician earplugs, the clinical rule of thumb is the longer the better.  This has to do with the issue of stability as well as minimizing the occlusion effect. Simply stated, the occlusion effect is caused by the wearer’s own voice (or vibration energy from their instrument that is transduced through the mandible and condyle to the boney portion

Musician earplugs use some very creative methods to ensure that the attenuation that a musician receives is as flat as possible.  The lower frequency fundamental notes and the higher frequency harmonics are all treated identically- the spectrum of the music remains the same, albeit at a slightly lower level.   Technologies to accomplish this typically involve passive acoustic networks that utilize

As readers of this blog are already aware, most modern hearing aids do a poorer job of reproducing music than many of the hearing aids in the late 1980s.  The limitation with all digital hearing aids is the analog-to-digital (A/D) converter that converts analog sound and music from the microphone into a series of numbers for the digital hearing aid

This is the fifth in a series of blogs outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these blogs one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided  “obvious” recording cues (such

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these posts one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided  “obvious” recording cues

This is the third in a series of blogs outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these blogs one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided “obvious” recording cues (such

This is the second in a series of blogs outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these blogs one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided  “obvious” recording cues (such

This is the first in a series of blogs outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these blogs one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided  “obvious” recording cues (such

Depending on the three ways that acoustic feedback management is implemented, one should think twice about enabling such a feature.  The three ways that have been used are: (1) phase cancellation, (2) overall reduction of gain, and (3) notch filtering. As discussed in Part I of this blog last week, phase cancellation is based on the generation of a sound

When all is considered, one can truly say that the real advantage of digital hearing aids is feedback management allowing the hearing aid wearer to achieve more gain before feedback is encountered.  There is scant evidence about the benefit of any of the other “advanced features” in hearing aids.  And other than feedback management (and perhaps a greater bandwidth) hearing