Musicians’ perception of processing delay when listening to music through open-fit devices

Hearing aid technology, primarily developed for optimizing speech intelligibility as opposed to sound quality, is also applied for the treatment of hearing-impaired musicians. An important factor for hearing aid sound quality is the processing delay, which can cause undesirable artefacts, contributing to low hearing aid adoption rates. In this study, the relationship between preferred sound quality for music and three hearing aid processing delays (0.5, 5 and 10 ms) was investigated. Using a realistic simulator of open-fit digital hearing aids, 12 professional musicians completed a paired-comparison preference task and a qualitative assessment test. When listening to jazz, classic and pop samples, the participants could hear out differences and verbally qualify their preferences for the tested delays. Delay differences were thus perceivable and elicited different preferences, albeit not for the shortest delay.