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I hope other manufacturers copy Widex's 'Dual Compressor' feature!

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I think Widex’s ‘Dual Compressor’ feature is totally underrated! I’d love to have it on my Phonak and ReSound .

Why? Because it allows for proper sound mixing when the HAs operate in streaming mode and the HA microphones are on at the same time.

Right now, almost all manufacturers (except ReSound) have a dedicated streaming mode that uses different gain settings vs. all other modes. This makes sense - with a typical ski slope hearing loss profile and an open fitting, you hear low frequencies naturally and the HAs don’t have to amplify them.

However, when streaming, the HAs do need to amplify low frequency sounds that are part of the streaming signal, otherwise it would sound tinny.

Hence the dedicated streaming program that applies appropriate gain settings.

The problem comes when you want to stream and listen to ambient sounds via the HA microphones at the same time.

You would need one set of gain settings for streaming signal, and another set of gain settings for the microphones. Both would have to be active at the same time.

Widex’s ‘dual compressors’ are exactly that: two ‘sets of gain settings’.

Why can’t other manufacturers easily add this feature? Because the ‘compressor’ (the part that applies different gains to different frequencies) is part of the chip hardware. To reduce latency and power consumption. It’s not just a software feature that can be introduced to existing HAs via firmware update.

Hi,

Widex’s dual compression technology actually refers to variable speed compression, variants of which are used by at least Phonak, Oticon and a few other manufacturers I cannot recall right now.

I think what you’re referring to is the Allure-specific second streaming compressor. This processes streaming audio input and input from the microphone separately, so that if the environmental sound becomes too loud and requires compression to maintain user comfort; the streaming audio signal with its own independent compressor is not affected by this.

Phonak have two dedicated streaming settings: one for spoken content and one for music. Both can receive microphone input at the same time. I haven’t heard any complaints about streaming quality in loud noise, but I’ll ask a Phonak rep about it. It may be that people are manually adjusting the streaming audio/microphone balance to reduce environmental sound when things get too loud, whereas Widex didn’t have the option so theirs is a solution to a problem they couldn’t otherwise resolve. I suspect adjusting the microphone/streaming balance is what most manufacturers would recommend that users do in very loud environments.

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