Reply to Wimmer et al.’s comments concerning: ‘off the ear with no loss in speech understanding: comparing the RONDO and the OPUS 2 cochlear implant audio processors’

Regarding the comment of Wimmer et al. on our article “Off the ear with no loss in speech understanding: comparing the RONDO and the OPUS2 cochlear implant audio processors” [1], we would like to acknowledge that their comment has merit. Wimmer et al.’s article “Speech intelligibility in noise with a single-unit cochlear implant audio processor” [2] found that speech understanding in noise with the RONDO was only significantly worse than with the OPUS 2 when speech was presented from the front and noise from the back (the S₀N₁₈₀ setting)—not when speech was presented from the front (S₀N₀) of the sides (S₀N_IL and S₀N_CL). Considering that our article did not specify the test setup we used for speech understanding in noise testing, it was inaccurate to assert that Wimmer et al.’s findings contradicted our own or those of Mertens et al. [3] and Távora-Vieira and Miller [4] without considering test setup.

We agree with the assertion that testing speech understanding in noise in different spatial settings gives a greater picture of our subjects’ hearing in “everyday life” than only testing in S₀N₀. We would, however, state that (1) hearing in everyday life cannot be adequately assessed by conducting speech testing only and that (2) subjective questionnaires, such as the HISQUI19 and RONDO-specific questionnaire used in our study, are valuable resources for assessing how CIs devices affect their users’ hearing lives. Ideally, future studies will use different spatial settings and subjective questionnaires to assess speech understanding. Finally, our results (on the questionnaires) show that regardless of where sound and noise came from in everyday life, the RONDO was well accepted by the former OPUS 2 users.