Cochlear implant systems can offer a wide range of benefits including hearing speech, environmental sounds and music. Results reported with today’s cochlear implants consistently indicate speech understanding for the majority of implanted patients. Benefit from a cochlear implant is most readily measured within the scientific community by the percentage of speech a cochlear implant user can understand in a laboratory setting without lip-reading. Although openset speech understanding is a very imporant measure of hearing ability, it is by no means the only benefit cochlear implant users report. The perception of environmental sounds, such as doorbells, alarm signals, etc. can make a substantial difference in the life of a person who is severely hard of hearing.