Analogue Hearing Aids
Analogue hearing aids have been around for decades; these conventional hearing aids use more traditional technology and are still used today, but more advanced, newer technology has meant there is a much reduced demand for them. The most basic analogue hearing aid has a microphone which picks up sound waves and changes these waveforms into electrical waves. These waves are then amplified and then converted back into an acoustic signal by the hearing aid's receiver.
Any manipulation of this analogue wave will produce an element of distortion which may impede clarity when this electrical waveform is changed back to an acoustic signal. This can interfere with speech perception and create "unnaturalness" in the perceived performance of the hearing aid. These aids also have the tendency to add the same amount of amplification to all levels of sound intensity, this can result in problems such as doors shutting, cutlery rattling and toilets flushing being far too loud for the user.
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Some users of these basic analogue hearing aids comment that they either provide too little or too much amplification to reach a comfortable listening level for their particular hearing loss. As a consequence they are forever turning the volume up and down on their hearing aids.
As a consequence to the above more advanced technology circuits were incorporated into the analogue range. Through non linear or compression amplification it became possible to limit the distortion of loud sounds and background sounds to a certain degree. However, these still proved to be limited in their performance especially in dealing with unwanted background noise. Hence the need and desire to have a more effective system of amplifying sound and controlling unwanted sound was sought…
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