THE PERCEPTION OF INTERNAL CIRCUIT NOISE IN HEARING-AIDS BY LISTENERSWITH NORMAL-HEARING

Internal circuit noise in hearing aids is distracting to a listener an d, if loud enough, may interfere with intelligibility either by direct masking of weak components of speech or through the generation of und esired intermodulation products,which can also act as a source of mask ing. The objective characteristics of noise may be measured; however, wearers of hearing aids often differ in their subjective reporting of the perceived characteristics of the internal noise. This study report s on the results for four listeners with normal hearing of matching pi tch and amplitude to the internal noise generated within a series of h earing aids. Results of these experiments showed that the listeners (a ) primarily matched the perceived pitch of the noise to the frequency of their most sensitive hearing, and (b) matched the perceived level o f the noise approximately to the total SPL noise level.