Abstract
Two hearing aids (Gyrus RetroX™ (RXS) and GN-ReSound AIR60™ (AIR)) have been compared in 10 normal and 10 hearing impaired subjects. Speech recognition threshold (SRT) was adaptively measured from different noise directions. In normal hearing subjects, RXS tends to somewhat worsen the masked SRT when noise comes from lateral and rear directions. AIR tends to worsen the SRT with frontal noise while improving the SRT with noise at the rear. In hearing impaired subjects both AIR and RXS show a reduction of s/n compared to the unaided condition, indicating that the two instruments are effective in improving the masked SRT as they do not introduce consistent distortion in perception of speech signals. In summary, the two hearing aids seem to indicate a substantially similar performance, at least for the tested conditions. However, a patient candidate for an open-fitting solution should be informed about the other properties of these hearing aids, such as visibility, possible skin reaction and additional devices hosted in the instruments.