Testing How Your Hearing Aids Work With Sound Files That Have Noisy Restaurant Scenarios

One reason everyone might be interested in the ReSound Smart Fit software is that it comes with a set of demo sound files. Independently of running the fitting software itself, these files can be found on a Windows computer in the ReSound Program Files (x86) folder under Common Files\MediaSoundFiles. They are provided on a Windows computer as .WMA files (Windows Media Audio) but with the VLC Player for Windows (the one you have to download from the VIDEOLAN organization site), you can easily convert the sound files to other formats such as .MP3. There are a variety of sample files of things like birds singing, young children talking and people in noisy places. For the people in noisy places, the audio recording is provided without any background noise and there are versions with the speech at 0 dB, 5 dB, and 10 dB above background noise.

So what we have here, then, is essentially a standardized test for anyone willing to find out how to get the Smart Fit software from the DIY section to test in the same way as anyone else how well their HA’s are working for them.

With my Quattro’s, I can basically hear everything that is said in the noisy LUNCH recording with the speech at 0 dB above the background noise. I have to say that it doesn’t sound like the worst noisy restaurant that I’ve ever been in. The most noisy restaurants I’ve been in probably have the speech at a negative level relative to the noise!

Unfortunately the allowed uploads for this forum only allow images so I can’t upload an .MP3 of the lunch conversation at 0 dB above background noise. So if you’re curious, you’d have to check out the Smart Fit 1.3 software yourself. It’s about a 1 Gb download, though, from the source.

Another very interesting feature only accessible from within the software is, after you’ve input your audiogram, the fitting software can play a much more limited selection of sound files both as a normal person would hear them and as you would hear them if you weren’t wearing your HA’s. The purpose of this feature is probably to demonstrate to a normal hearing companion of a hearing impaired person how serious the hearing deficit of a patient is and how correction would help restore hearing. For instance if I listen to the hearing impaired versions played according to my deficit (while wearing my HA’s so I can tell the normal version from the hearing impaired version), I can hear the lack of high frequency audio in the jazz example and in the children talking examples vs. the normal sounds when playing the media file unfiltered through my sound loss profile.

Excellent point! I thought of the same issue and I knew either you or Neville would have had something to say about this like you did.

The only thing a stereoscopic or mono speaker frontal set up can verify is how well the hearing aid can filter noise sources already diffused into the speech and coming from the front. But it doesn’t test how well the hearing aid manages the actual surrounding noises. Like you said, a better set up is to have an array of surrounding speakers, each simulating various noise sources as well as blended noise sources like babble.

For the OPN in particular, which builds a noise model of sounds from the sides and the back, the frontal speaker only noise test wouldn’t be very useful because the noise model created in this artificial set up would be pretty much null of sounds .

It would be very cool though, if a professional would go to the trouble of building such a set up for their patients. The most challenging part would be to go out and collect sounds from noisy environments to recreate that environment in the test room. For example, if you have an array of 10 speakers in the test room, you’d need to go out to an environment and set up 10 mics in the locations where those speakers would be in the test room and record the sounds from each of those locations. A lot of work.