Acoustic analysis of the directional information captured by five different hearing aid styles

作者：Durin Virginie; Carlile Simon^*; Guillon Pierre; Best Virginia; Kalluri Sridhar

来源：Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014, 136(2): 818-828.

DOI：10.1121/1.4883372

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.

• 出版日期2014-8