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There is much confusion by consumers as to how the hearing aid actually works. There are two distinct types of devices. The difference in the two lies in how each device processes sound. These two processing technologies are analog and digital. Digital technology is the latest advancement in sound processing and can be found now in everything form sound systems to telephones. The original sound processing technology was analog. The differences in the two lie in how the sound can be manipulated. In a digital system sounds are merely sampled then transformed into digital signals prior to amplification. In an analog device a continuous sound wave is captured that contains all the sound picked up by the microphone and then all sound is amplified equally. The hearing aid has been around since the 1600s but these first devices were extremely crude. All early versions were literally no more than a mechanical extension of cupping your hands over your ears. It wasn't until Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone that the advent of the modern hearing aid came into being. The first versions of personal sound amplification devices were unwieldy because they used bulky vacuum tubes and it finally took the invention of the transistor in 1948 to turn these into truly portable devices. Transistors, they found, had other benefits too besides being small. The transistor required less electrical power, and it produced less sound distortion and heat than bulky tubes. In 1952 Sonotone introduced the first analog hearing aid that used a transistor. It was model 1010 and finally came on the market in December 1952 just in time for Christmas. The Sonotone model was a smaller hybrid version of the completely tube powered amplifier. It used a combination of tubes and transistors. Several other competitors soon imitated this hybrid version of the hearing aid. Texas instruments, an electronics company based in Dallas Texas, also got into the game when it introduced the first silicon transistor. Soon after this evolution Texas Instruments created the integrated circuit, which spelled the end of the transistor. There were still problems associated with analog devices though. One of those was the fact that with an analog device, sometimes in a noisy environment such as a crowded room, amplified all ambient sound as a single signal. This is, however, what analog does. It does not inherently have the capacity to distinguish garbage background noise from sound you are trying to concentrate of such as speech. To counter this, manufacturers began to incorporate mechanical discriminators into some of their devices. By throwing a small switch the analog devices would cut out or lower amplification of certain frequencies. While this did help it did not stop the evolution of sound amplification. Today there are also digital devices that incorporate automatic frequency discriminators among other sound processing enhancements. The development of digital processing, however, has not dealt a deathblow to analog devices. Among those with profound loss many people prefer analog to digital because of the analogs ability to enhance background sound and provide a better sense of overall sound recognition. Analog also provides clearer recognition in quiet environments. A digital device, because of compression protocols, seems to just muffle these environments. Looking for a Modesto, CA hearing aid center? Visit: http://www.miracle-ear-modestoca.com/hearing_aids.html for more information.
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