Starkey

Brand Profile: Starkey Laboratories

Starkey Laboratories got its start in 1967 when William Austin founded Professional Hearing Aid Service, an hearing instrument repair service in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. After setting new standards for the way repairs were handled, Austin acquired Starkey Laboratories, a small earmold company, in 1971. Austin merged the two businesses under the Starkey name, and eventually began making custom in-the-ear hearing aids with a then-revolutionary no-obligation trial and “worry-free” warranty.

Today, Starkey Laboratories is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of custom hearing instruments with 33 facilities in 18 countries throughout North America, Central America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and a workforce of over 4,000. Starkey introduced two flagship product lines in 2010, the S-Series iQ family of behind-the-ear and in-the-ear hearing aids, and the SoundLens family of “invisible” hearing aids that sit deep within the ear canal. The company also markets its Zon and Destiny series hearing aids, along with a complete range of pediatric hearing aid products. The S-Series iQ products feature an advanced algorithm helping users hear speech in noise that is based on advanced long-term research into hearing and cognition done at the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California, which the company set up in 2004.

Starkey has additional corporate units that develop other products, including hearing protection products for the consumer industrial and military markets; Bluetooth headsets for consumers and office use; and custom earpieces for musicians and audio professionals.

One of the world’s leading philanthropists, William Austin in 1973 started the Starkey Hearing Foundation, which has distributed tens of thousands of free hearing aids to needy children and adults in dozens of countries around the world. In addition to philanthropic endeavors, the foundation supports hearing research and education, and provides support and sponsorship for several industry-level public awareness campaigns.

Recent Posts About Starkey Laboratories:

Can Hearing Aids Make You Smarter? Research On Cognitive Hearing and Listening Fatigue Says They Can — Is The Industry Finally Listening?

Hearing aid manufacturers have finally started listening to ten years of academic research into concepts known as “cognitive hearing,” “listening fatigue” and “cognitive fatigue.” It took them long enough, but I’m not complaining, because at least they are finally claiming to attack the problem of hearing loss at its roots.

In recent announcements of their next-generation hearing aids, industry leaders Starkey Laboratories and Oticon both claimed their new products would ameliorate “cognitive fatigue” and therefore improve not only hearing but also the ability to listen and understand. Since the invention of the hearing aid, the industry has focused mostly on simple amplification that makes noise louder and therefore easier to hear. Too often, hearing aids amplify the noises uses don’t want to hear and actually make it more difficult to comprehend the sounds — speech — they do want to hear. Now the industry is finally trying to address the critical issue of better cognition.

While neither Starkey nor Oticon went so far as to say their hearing aids would make you smarter, that’s really the value proposition the industry should start trying to deliver. No, hearing aids can’t make you smarter all by themselves. But hearing well can enable you to listen well, and listening well can enable you to better understand what you hear, better understanding makes it easier for you to communicate in real time with other people, and intelligent communication lets your brain be as smart as it naturally wants to be. Now think of the same scenario in reverse: no hearing assistance means less listening means less understanding means less intelligent communication. In other words, failure to get a good pair of hearing aids can make you appear to be a whole lot stupider than you really are.

The catch is what constitutes a “good pair of hearing aids.” Dr. Brent Edwards at the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, California has been looking at the issue of “cognitive hearing” for years, and his work is finally working its way into the products Starkey is delivering to the marketplace. Read more

Starkey’s S Series iQ Hearing-Aid Family Attacks Hearing-In-Noise Problem

Anyone who has gone to dinner in a noisy restaurant only to discover their hearing aids were amplifying the cacophony to unbearable levels without enabling them to understand their companions at all will bear witness to the fact that better comprehension of speech in noise is the Holy Grail of the hearing-aid industry. The new S Series IQ hearing-aid family from Starkey Laboratories is a big step in the right direction.

It’s been known for years that constant improvements in the speed and processing power of digital signal processors should logically enable better algorithms for comprehending speech in noise. But solutions that work well have been a long time coming. That’s because digital sound processing technology enabling hearing-aid users to better understand speech-in-noise is a game of milliseconds. It’s excruciatingly difficult to come up with algorithms fast enough to sample the speech and background noise inputs in real time and separate the wheat from the chaff: the processing system must separate the useful speech from the harmful background noise, and then actively amplify the good and suppress the bad. Read more

USA Today: How Starkey Founder Bill Austin Does Well By Doing Good

USA Today has published a wonderful profile on Bill Austin, Founder and CEO of the biggest hearing-aid manufacturer in the U.S., Starkey Laboratories. It focuses rightly on the phenomenal degree of philanthropic work he’s done, distributing free hearing aids to millions of people in need throughout the world. It also reviews his history as a super salesman of hearing aids, with his biggest breakthrough fitting President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Read more

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