title: Acoustic analysis of the directional information captured by five different hearing aid styles.
abstract: This study compared the head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) recorded from the bare ear of a mannequin for 393 spatial locations and for five different hearing aid styles: Invisible-in-the-canal (IIC), completely-in-the-canal (CIC), in-the-canal (ITC), in-the-ear (ITE), and behind-the-ear (BTE). The spectral distortions of each style compared to the bare ear were described qualitatively in terms of the gain and frequency characteristics of the prominent spectral notch and two peaks in the HRTFs. Two quantitative measures of the differences between the HRTF sets and a measure of the dissimilarity of the HRTFs within each set were also computed. In general, the IIC style was most similar and the BTE most dissimilar to the bare ear recordings. The relative similarities among the CIC, ITC, and ITE styles depended on the metric employed. The within-style spectral dissimilarities were comparable for the bare ear, IIC, CIC, and ITC with increasing ambiguity for the ITE and BTE styles. When the analysis bandwidth was limited to 8 kHz, the HRTFs within each set became much more similar.
authors.affiliation: VAST Audio Pty Ltd., 4 Cornwallis Street, Eveleigh, New South Wales 2015, Australia.
authors.forename: Virginie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Durin
authors.affiliation: Bosh Institute and School of Medical Sciences, Anderson Stuart Building (F13), University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Carlile
authors.affiliation: Computing and Audio Research Laboratory, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
authors.forename: Pierre
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Guillon
authors.affiliation: Bosh Institute and School of Medical Sciences, Anderson Stuart Building (F13), University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
authors.forename: Virginia
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Best
authors.affiliation: Starkey Hearing Research Center, 2150 Shattuck Avenue, Suite 408, Berkeley, California 94704-1345.
authors.forename: Sridhar
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kalluri
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004867:Equipment Design; D006310:Hearing Aids; D008348:Manikins; D008422:Materials Testing; D009716:Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013018:Sound Spectrography