Improved TV/radio listening for hearing impaired

In case different persons, having different preferences for the loudness level, want to listen to one sound program in one room, problems arise concerning the loudness of the reproduced program. An example: person A has a normal hearing threshold, while person B is hearing impaired. A sound reproduction system, consisting of a small array of loudspeakers at the TV/radio can solve this problem with digital signal processing; the directivity pattern of the array is manipulated such that the main lobe is directed to person B. The investigation and the presentation at the conference contains two parts: (1) physical acoustics: design and testing of the loudspeaker array including digital processing, and (2) subjective evaluation with normal-hearing subjects and hearing impaired subjects. The subjects listen (and view) a TV program consisting of a selection from 120 short spoken sentences. The normal-hearing subjects adjust the loudness level at their listening position. The hearing-impaired subjects test the effect of the array. These listening tests show a clear improvement in the speech intelligibility for the hearing-impaired subjects as expressed in the number of correct understood sentences and in subjective terms as ‘‘easier to understand‘‘ or ‘‘less tiring to listen to.’’