Salt Lake City—Sonic Innovations, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNCI) a U.S.-based manufacturer of digital hearing aids, is celebrating its 10-year anniversary during 2008.
The company is the largest publicly traded U.S.-based hearing aid manufacturer. More than half of the company's revenue is generated from outside the United States (company revenue for 2007 was $122 million).
"In just 10 years Sonic Innovations has leveraged its world class sound technology to become one of the largest hearing device manufacturers in the world. Sonic Innovations was among the first companies to implement digital technology into hearing aids and is a leader in digital-signal processing," noted Sonic Innovations CEO Sam Westover. "We continue to be a pioneer in our industry through continuous improvements in sound quality, by significantly decreasing the size of our hearing aids and through the development of new features that make our hearing devices simple to use and easily adaptable to the active lifestyle."
Sonic Innovations was founded upon sound technology from three internationally renowned scientists—Douglas Chabries, Thomas Stockham Jr. and Carver Mead--each with a Ph.D. in engineering. Chabries created algorithms that led to better speech-understanding in noise. Stockham, known as the "father of digital recording," developed mathematical methods that are used today in playing DVDs, processing Hubble space telescope images, improving medical images and creating better hearing aids. He is the only electrical engineering professor to be awarded a Grammy, an Emmy and an Academy Award. Mead is recognized as the father of large-scale integrated circuits. He has been involved in the start-up of over 20 different companies, including Intel.
In 1998, the company developed its first product, the Natura® hearing aid. (The name was derived from the fact that so many subjects in the field trials repeatedly said how natural the hearing aid sounded.) Natura® was one of the first digital hearing aids in the marketplace.
Westover noted that before the development of digital hearing aids, analog technology did not allow clinicians to maximize benefit for every patient's unique listening needs. In the simplest of terms, digital technology gives clinicians very fine frequency and volume adjustments, and access to tools that can control background noise while amplifying speech.
Since 1998, Sonic Innovations has developed several different digital product lines with a wide variety of features. Sonic Innovations will introduce two new hearing aids, representing a fourth generation of technological advancements, in April at the American Academy of Audiology Conference in Charlotte, N.C.
Sonic Innovations is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, and has nearly 700 employees worldwide. Sonic distributes hearing aids in 25 countries, and has offices in Canada, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, United Kingdom, Austria and Switzerland.
About Sonic Innovations
Sonic Innovations, Inc. is the largest, publicly traded U.S.-based hearing aid manufacturer. The company was founded with a mission to commercialize a unique digital signal processing platform for hearing aids. Sonic Innovations hearing aids were among the first of their kind clinically proven to increase speech understanding in noise for the hearing impaired. Sonic Innovations, headquartered in Salt Lake City, is listed on the NASDAQ Global Market System and can be found online at www.sonici.com or Sonic Innovations Web Channel at Audiology Online.
Sonic Innovations Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary
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