The Fundamental Asynchronous Stimulus Timing (FAST) strategy offers excellent potential as a low power alternative coding strategy to the current default strategy in Nucleus® cochlear implants, Advanced Combination Encoder (ACE). Additionally, FAST offers potential bilateral benefits - localization and listening in spatially separated noise - because it has been shown in acute, controlled studies to provide more access to interaural timing difference (ITD) cues (Smith, 2010).Previous research with experienced cochlear-implant recipients has shown issues with conversion from ACE to FAST. The FAST strategy typically sounds very different in quality, and acclimatization can be lengthy. This extended adaptation time makes it difficult to show conclusively that FAST is non-inferior to ACE for speech understanding. A potential barrier to evaluating performance with FAST in current cochlear-implant recipients is the extensive amount of prior experience that many recipients have using ACE. Hence, there is a distinct need to evaluate FAST in newly implanted recipients.
