Assistive Listening Knowledge Base
  • Peer-reviewed study (laboratory bandwidth comparison)

Extended high-frequency bandwidth improves reception of speech in spatially separated masking speech

From https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/levy-2015-extended-bandwidth/ · record checked 13 October 2026

  • Levy SC, Freed DJ, Nilsson M, Moore BCJ, Puria S
  • Ear and Hearing 36(5):e214-e224

Manufacturer (EarLens-affiliated research, partly supported by NIH/NIDCD SBIR grant R44 DC008499 to EarLens Corporation; the authors declare financial interests in EarLens)

Summary

Compared sentence reception with 4, 6, 8 and 10 kHz bandwidths in spatially separated competing speech.

Key findings

  • The bandwidth experiments included 25 adults with symmetric mild-to-severe sensorineural hearing loss and 24 with normal hearing. Listeners with hearing loss used individually adjusted simulated amplification through insert earphones.
  • Increasing bandwidth from 4 to 10 kHz improved the mean sentence reception threshold by 1.3 dB with target and maskers on opposite sides, and 0.5 dB with diffuse masking, for listeners with hearing loss. The effect across conditions was significant.
  • Normal-hearing listeners benefited more, with about 3 dB improvement. The authors call for tests with other maskers and reverberation.

Limits

Shared evidence about audible bandwidth, not a venue transmission-system comparison. All recorded talkers were male; hearing-loss and normal-hearing groups used different presentation arrangements. Read the full author manuscript in PMC. The date uses the September-October 2015 journal issue, with month precision.

Read the original

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4549240

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Cited in

Cite this source

Levy SC, Freed DJ, Nilsson M, Moore BCJ, Puria S. Extended high-frequency bandwidth improves reception of speech in spatially separated masking speech. Ear and Hearing 36(5):e214-e224. September 2015. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4549240/ (accessed 13 October 2026).

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