Phonak Dynamic Soundfield Technology Turns The Classroom Into A Giant Hearing Aid

Soundfield classroom amplification systems have improved the education and lives of thousands of schoolchildren who otherwise would miss valuable instruction simply because they cannot hear their teachers well enough to understand what they are teaching. Now Phonak has put its vast experience designing hearing aids to use with a next-generation soundfield system featuring a 12-speaker array that reduces echoing and reverberation and automatically adjusts frequency and volume levels to achieve optimum signal-to-noise ratios in changing listening environments.  The new Phonak Dynamic Soundfield system essentially turns the entire classroom into a giant hearing aid that can dramatically improve comprehension and learning.

Classroom amplification systems have been around a long time, as have FM-based systems transmitting the teacher’s voice into headsets or hearing aids worn by individual hard-of-hearing students. But the experience of users varies tremendously depending on the placement and quality of speakers, the quality of the microphones and amplifiers, and the acoustics of the classroom itself. The drawbacks of earlier systems were so pronounced that the Acoustical Society of America found that “improperly maintained microphones and loudspeakers or poor user skills can cause even poorer speech communication than no amplification system.” In other words, amplifying unintelligible noise only makes voices that much more unintelligible.

But long-term studies have indicated that amplification and other forms of assistance in the classroom can dramatically improve learning The Mainstream Amplification Resource Room Study (MARRS), which found that “significant educational instruction effects can be achieved by sound field amplification” and that “these gains can be cost effectively realized within the regular classroom without the need for stigmatizing labeling and segregation as well as expensive and scheduling complications of special class placement.”

Phonak’s Dynamic Soundfield system addresses the reverberation and echoing that makes comprehension more difficult with amplification by its array of directional speakers that automatically adjust frequency and volume settings to the acoustics of the room to reduce rather than increase reverberation. Years of research into how directional microphones in hearing aids can achieve a higher signal-to-noise ratio to make voices easier to understand in difficult listening environments have been applied to the acoustical problems amplifying a teacher’s voice in a noisy classroom.

The new Phonak Soundfield system is also the first to operate simultaneously in multiple modes, permitting the teacher to broadcast directly through a Phonak inspiro FM transmitter to individual students wearing headsets or hearing aids while broadcasting to the rest of the class over the amplified system. The new system also is “future proof,” providing flexible integration with standard computer and audio systems, and eliminates interference issues through automatic frequency hopping, allowing the Dynamic Soundfield to co-exist alongside a school’s WiFi and Bluetooth networks.