Gilbert M, et al. - Given the frequent reporting of poor sound quality while listening to music by cochlear implant (CI) users, researchers examined the relative impact of compression for acoustic and electric hearing on music perception. In this work, they tested their hypothesis that increased levels of compression are more easily detected by normal-hearing (NH) listeners than CI users, but that both groups would perceive a loss of sound quality with increasing compression levels. Using Cochlear Implant-MUltiple Stimulus with Hidden Reference and Anchor, evaluation of the listener's sensitivity to increasing levels of compression applied to music stimuli was done. Multiple iterations of an aggressive compression algorithm were applied to the music clips using Adobe Audition. One, three, five and 20 iterations sound tokens were included as the test conditions; the 20-iteration samples served as the Anchor stimuli. The compressed excerpts were 5 sec in length, with five clips for each of the five common musical genres (ie, Classical, Jazz, Country, Rock, and Hip-Hop). Sound quality differences were detected by both NH and CI groups as a function of the compression level, however, the CI group exhibited blunted discriminatory ability compared to the NH group. Results indicate less sensitivity to sound quality changes in music among CI users, which seemed attributable to high levels of compression.