Echo threshold between passive and electro-acoustic transmission paths in digital hearing protection devices

• Electronic hearing protection devices HPDs are increasingly used in industrial noisy environments.
• Electronic HPDs can transmit useful audio signals such as speech and warning signals to the protected ear.
• This study evaluates the maximum allowable latency between the digitally and passively transmitted signals in electronic HPDs.
• The echo threshold was found to be ranging from 8 ms to 26 ms, depending on four parameters.
• These results are of great value for the design of ergonomic electronic hearing protection devices.

Electronic hearing protection devices are increasingly used in noisy environments. Theses devices feature a miniaturized external microphone and internal loudspeaker in addition to an analog or digital electronic circuit. They can transmit useful audio signals such as speech and warning signals to the protected ear and can reduce the sound pressure level using dynamic range compression. In the case of a digital electronic circuit, the transmission of audio signals may be noticeably delayed because of the latency introduced by the digital signal processor and by the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters. These delayed audio signals will hence interfere with the audio signals perceived naturally through the passive acoustical path of the device. The proposed study presents an original procedure to evaluate, for two representative passive earplugs, the shortest delay at which human listeners start to perceive two sounds composed of the signal transmitted through the electronic circuit and the passively transmitted signal. This shortest delay is called the echo threshold and represents the delay between the time of perception of one fused sound from two separate sounds. In this study, a transient signal, a clean speech signal, a speech signal corrupted by factory noise, and a speech signal corrupted by babble noise are used to determine the echo thresholds of the two earplugs. Twenty untrained listeners participated in this study, and were asked to determine the echo thresholds using a test software in which attenuated signals are delayed from the original signals in real-time. The findings show that when using hearing devices, the echo threshold depends on four parameters: (a) the attenuation function of the device, (b) the duration of the signal, (c) the level of the background noise and (d) the type of background noise. Defined here as the shortest time delay at which at least 20% of the participants noticed an echo, the echo threshold was found to be 8 ms for a bell signal, 16 ms for clean speech and 22 ms for speech corrupted by babble noise when using a shallow earplug fit. When using a deep fit, the echo threshold was found to be 18 ms for a bell signal and 26 ms for clean speech and 68 ms for speech in factory. No echo threshold could be clearly determined for the speech signal in babble noise with a deep earplug fit.