The TruSound softener

Widex have introduced a new platform with the Clear family, it has some new and updated features. The Clear is a dramatic departure from most Hearing Aid strategies used to date, however it is a natural progression of ideas & strategies that Widex have been using for several years.

These strategies and features will be explained in a series of articles, in this is the first and we will discuss the TruSound Softener. Although Widex has always since the days of the Senso had a relatively effective feature to deal with impulse sounds, they decided to use the potential of the Clear chip to update it. The TruSound softener is a new algorithm for detecting and handling impulse sounds.

The TruSound  Softener improves the handling of sounds that are, very brief (<1 sec), very sudden, often loud and annoying when amplified through a hearing aid. These sounds can occur at all input levels, loud such as fireworks, hammer blows and slamming doors. Medium such as porcelain chinks, rattling cutlery and soft such as computer keystrokes and a ticking clock. These sounds are technically difficult to handle, because they share some of the characteristics of plosives in speech.

Widex developed TruSound Softener to attack those annoying transients without affecting transient speech sounds. The key is the ability of the analysis system in the Clear to recognise the differences between the transient sounds and deal with them in different manners. The true key is compression, adaptive compression. Widex is famous for its sound quality, while several factors contribute to this, a major part of the foundation is its’ use of slow acting compression.

There are great advantages to slow acting compression, it prevents temporal and spectral smearing and improves listener comfort producing a fantastic sound quality. However, fast compression is necessary in some situations. The TruSound Softener along with the TruSound AOC and the TruSound Stabilisers were designed by Widex to deal with these situations. Transient sounds are a special challenge for hearing aid manufacturers. The TruSound Softener is designed specifically to deal with impulse sounds. The Analyzer detects the specific characteristics of impulse sounds and activates ultra fast compression to deal with the sound in defined specific and relevant channels. There is no overall reduction of gain and indeed gain is reduced according to and taking into account the hearing loss.

The gain is adjusted instantaneously by the ultra fast acting compression which is then reduced quickly to bring it back to the default slow compression strategy. The strength of this feature is adjustable by the Dispenser allowing them to increase the strength to suit their highly sensitive Patients. In summary the strategy was designed to increase the effectiveness of the impulse sound reduction feature already present. It does so with instantaneous gain reduction which is possible because of the strength of Widex’s signal analysis. Transient sounds are attenuated whilst speech sounds are not affected.