[varunsrin]

hey anigbrowl, OP here.

You raise some great points - it is indeed impossible to use an MBC to bring sounds back into a user's range of hearing if they have lost all sensibility at that particular frequency. However, the loss of hearing at a particular frequency is not binary - it tends to start with a reduction in dynamic range at that frequency, as the cilia start to get worn out / destroyed.

So if you have loss @ 3 KHz, you don't often completely lose all hearing, but your dynamic range which normally is 0dB -> 100 dB (over-simplification here) might now be 30 dB -> 100 dB.

What an MBC will do here is compress the range at that frequency band, so your 100dB of range is now 70dB of range.

[anigbrowl]

I get what you're aiming at, and I applaud what you're trying to do - I just think that you've over-simplified a complex topic, to the point of creating quite a bit of confusion, going by this thread. To quote Einstein, “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

[diydsp]

There are numerous interstitiated mechanisms in hearing. I don't see why MBC in particular would be valuable, other than amplifying quiet parts automatically, which could in fact have the opposite effect.

However, I think there is potential for many other mechanisms to be developed, such as automatic filtering, to eliminate masking in frequency and time domains.

The question I have is why other companies, such as Apple and Spotify, don't simply add this DSP technology to their software. What can SoundFocus do that can't be copied? Proprietary algorithms?