CES 2016. Sennheiser has been awarded the Innovation Awards Honoree at CES 2016 for its state-of-the-art HE 1060 hearing aids. The electrostatic hearing aid system has been honored in the "Hearing Aids" category and in the "High Performance Home Audio-Video" category.
Sennheiser's HE 1060, which will be handmade in Germany and available in mid-2016, impressed the jury with its combination of the most innovative technology with carefully selected materials and craftsmanship of the highest quality.
It's a work of art that comes at its price: the state-of-the-art hearing aids will cost around €50,000. Products that entered the prestigious CES Innovation Awards program are judged by a prominent panel of industrial designers, engineers, and independent media guild members to honor outstanding designs and engineering in innovative consumer electronics across 27 product categories.
Recently launched, the HE 1060 surpasses any other existing hearing aid system by offering the latest accuracy in reproduction, with the slightest harmonic distortion that has been measured in an audio playback system, exceptional spatiality and a frequency of response that extends beyond the range of the human's listening ability.
To make this possible, Sennheiser's team of experts spent nearly a decade of continuous work against the limits of what is technically feasible – and once again created the best hearing aids in the world. The HE 1060 uses an innovative amplifier concept that seamlessly combines the advantages of the tube amplifier with those of a transistor amplifier.
The decoupling of the tubes in combination with the damping property of marble has the effect of reducing the noise transmitted by the structure to an absolute minimum. The same tubes also have a high-quality patent-pending casing consisting of quartz glass bulbs that perfectly protect them from around them.
The tube amplifier phase is followed by an ultra-high impulse amplifier phase that is directly integrated into the headphones of the hearing aids. The result is impressive: a 200 percent increase in efficiency compared to other products.
Meticulous attention was paid to every detail of the HE 1060's material selection to fully exploit the sound potential of the hearing aids. Each of the more than 6,000 individual components was carefully chosen, their acoustic characteristics were evaluated and finally the optimal combination was put together. In other examples of this inflexible design ethos, Sennheiser used gold vaporizer ceramic electrodes and platinum vaporizer diaphragms to ensure the outstanding performance of the acoustic unit.
