We've all seen and possibly experimented with funnelingsounds into the ear with a large horn, or cone. This was the firstbeginnings of hearing help for many people. Fortunately, today'stechnology has taken this basic concept and developed it through threefunctional stages.

Analog
An Analog hearing aid works much the same way as traditional Hi-Fisystems. Sound is picked up by the microphone and is then converted toelectrical signals. This would be equivalent to the needle on yourrecord player feeding sound electrically to the amplifier of your Hi-Fisystem.

Once sound is turned from acoustic to electrical it isfed into the amplifier of the hearing aid. The sound is then amplifiedoverall and sent to the receiver (the loudspeaker of your Hi-Fi) of thehearing aid, and finally to the users ear.

This type of sound processing has been used by hearingaid manufacturers over many years now. The biggest drawback of Analogprocessing is that sound amplified is over the full frequency range ofhearing, so low frequency (background noise) would "mask" over the highfrequency (speech) sounds.

To alleviate this problem, manufacturers introduced"potentiometers" onto hearing aids, which, rather like a graphicequaliser on your hi-fi system, gave us the ability to reduce or enhancethe sounds needed by the end user to restore hearing to as 'normal' aspossible.

After analog came Programmable...

Programmable
Following on from Analog, Programmable gave us the ability of much moreprecise fine tuning. Whereas analog circuitry had the 'potentiometers'built onto the hearing aid,

Programmable enabled us to fine tune using a computer.Programmable circuitry had the 'potentiometers' built onto the circuitwithin the hearing aid, rather than sitting externally on the hearingaid.

This technology gave Starkey two advantages. One, wecould make hearing aids much smaller (because of the computerassistance), and two, Starkey were able to produce more 'potentiometers'(fine tuners) within the hearing aids.

Although this technology was far more advanced than theanalog of days gone by...it was still analog!

Which is where Digital technology came in...

Digital
Remember when the compact disc came out? With Digital hearing aids soundis processed in an entirely different way than the analogue products ofold.

Hearing instruments incorporating Digital SignalProcessing (DSP) are widely known these days as Digital hearing aids.The real difference between analogue and digital hearing instruments isthe ability of the DSP instruments to process more complex signalprocessing.

Sound is still received into the DSP instrument bymicrophone and converted into 'bits' of data. The circuitry within the'digital' hearing aid now acts like a very tiny computer.

The computer can sample the 'bits' of data and far moreaccurately fine tune to each individual's requirements. For example:when you walk into a noisy situation, how does the hearing aid know whatis speech and what is noise?

Digital hearing instruments compensate for differentlistening situations in a far more flexible, accurate and complex waythan any analogue circuit!