The past few decades have ushered in advances in directional hearing aid technologies, which have provided incremental improvements when listening to speech in noisy situations. The latest breakthrough, RealTime Conversation Enhancement (RTCE) using the multi-stream architecture in Signia Integrated Xperience (IX), further extends the directional benefit to dynamic communication situations with multiple conversation partners. This study sought to compare the performance of the RTCE to a non-RTCE based split processing technology when listening to two conversation partners. Because communication challenges can extend to dimensions not captured by speech recognition measures alone such as the listening being effortful, tiring, and stressful, we also measured subjective report of listening effort, and listeners’ willingness to stay in noise in addition to measurement of speech reception threshold.

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