When purchasing a digital hearing aid, the salesperson will recommend a multi-channel digital hearing aid. People often hear "single channel, dual channel, 6 channel" hearing aids and so on. There are many people who don't understand what is a hearing aid channel. What does this do to treat hearing loss? So today this article will take you through the hearing aid channel.
What is a hearing aid channel?
The hearing aid channel refers to the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) of the all-digital hearing aid divided into multiple independent circuits to calculate the sound of different frequency bands respectively. Since each unit processes the signals independently and does not affect each other, it is called It is the channel. It can be seen that the "channel" of the hearing aid is a hardware level concept.
The role of the hearing aid channel
According to the customer's hearing situation, the hearing aid is personalized and the customer is more satisfied. Each channel can independently adjust the size of the sound gain, inflection point, maximum output control. (The difference between the two adjacent channels is not too large).
When comparing hearing aids, everyone is accustomed to comparing who has more hearing aid channels. It seems that the more channels, the better the hearing aids. The purpose of the multi-channel processing of digital hearing aids is to better match the hearing loss of different shapes.
The American audiologists have done research. The optimal number of channels in 4-8 can meet the needs of most hearing patients. If only to meet the hearing curve, four-channel hearing aids will suffice. Recently, multi-channel hearing aids have introduced noise reduction features. The computer chip of the hearing aid detects ambient noise (such as noise of computers, air conditioners, and fans) in each channel, and noise reduction in the channel to improve speech. Clarity.
Generally speaking, the frequency band is a name for different frequency segments, and the channel is a sound processor in different frequency bands of the hearing aid itself. The fundamental difference between all-digital hearing aids and those simulated hearing aids that are on the verge of elimination is that different channels can be compressed with different channels, which has achieved the effect of separate compensation, because the loss of human hearing at each frequency point and segment is not the same, so you have to compensate through different channels.
If there is no channel and frequency band, then there is no difference between a hearing aid and a normal loudspeaker! In general, the more channels, the finer the compensation, the smaller the distortion of the sound heard by the patient, and the higher the clarity.
At this point, the channel is very important. In order to improve the clarity of patients and improve the comfort level under various environmental conditions, modern hearing aids introduce many new ideas in the fitting and debugging of hearing aids. Such as compression amplification, wide dynamic compression, noise reduction, speech spectrum enhancement, acoustic feedback management, wind noise management and so on.
Is the hearing aid channel as much as possible?
A channel, defined as a signal region consisting of one or several frequency bands, has independent compression characteristics that can be changed after division and are not affected by each other. This has the advantage of being able to accurately match the hearing loss of the patient's frequencies. In the process of hearing examination, we will basically test 6 points of hearing, 250/500/1000/2000/4000/8000
Of course, "the more the number of channels, the higher the price of hearing aids", which is indeed the concept that hearing aid manufacturers love to see.
However, in fact, the nature of the advantages and disadvantages of hearing aids cannot be measured by the number of channels, but by the processing performance of hearing aid chips. If you want to have an intelligent voice recognition processing system, you need a chip with powerful computing power to realize real-time detection and fast processing of various sounds, in order to better handle the complex and varied sound environment in our lives.
In order to better improve the comfort and clarity of listening in different environments, modern intelligent hearing aids introduce many technologies, such as bilateral hearing aid information exchange (binaural voice transmission), special enhancement of the voice of the front speaker (stereo) Focus), tracking and capturing of key language information (real scene surround), speech enhancement, etc.
Multi-channel is one of the most representative technologies, so it has the meaning of existence, but it is not an important indicator to judge the performance of hearing aids.
The number of channels is too large, and the complexity of sound sampling and processing is also stronger, so it is limited by the processing power and the distortion of the sound envelope, and the number of channels is not as good as possible. Moreover, the sound processing ideas of different brands of hearing aids are slightly different, and different brands cannot be horizontally compared.
Conclusion
The more hearing aid channels, the thinner the sound frequency range is, which is equivalent to the integration of multiple TILLs with a hearing aid hearing aid (the main effect is to achieve the normalization of loudness perception of the hearing impaired) and BILL (mainly The role is to reduce noise) frequency response, but the range of each frequency response is relatively reduced!
Specifically, you can choose a hearing aid according to your actual needs. It is not necessarily that the more channels you have, the better.
