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Objective: Treatment options for patients with single-sided deafness (SSD) and for patients with asymmetric hearing loss (AHL) are: conventional (bilateral) contralateral routing of signal ((Bi)CROS) hearing aid, bone conduction implant (BCI) and cochlear implant (CI). Only a CI allows restoration of binaural hearing. Advantages of binaural hearing with a CI have been shown in previous studies. Due to the heterogeneity of the studies, it is impossible to compare the results. The aim of our study is to collect comparable data by respecting a unified testing protocol designed for use in multicenter studies. Methods: At present seven SSD and AHL adult patients have been included in the study. Outcome measures are assessed pre- and postoperatively 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after activation of CI. Four patients have already completed the 6 months examinations. Amongst others, speech reception thresholds (SRT) unaided and CI-aided are measured for two different noises (olnoise and 2-talker babble noise (TTBN)) and for five different presentation conditions (SSSDNAH, SSSDN0, S0N0, S0NAH, SAHNSSD; SSD: stimulus presented to the deaf ear, AH: stimulus presented to the acoustically hearing ear, presentation angles -90°,0° and 90°). Thresholds were obtained using a modified Oldenburg sentence test (OLSA). Results: Six months after CI activation all patients performed much better with CI than preoperatively unaided: SRT improvements in TTBN range from 5.4 to 11.7 dB in the SSSDNAH condition (Head shadow effect), from 3.2 to 5.3 dB in S0N0 (Summation effect) and from 4.6 to 6.3 dB in S0NSSD (Squelch effect). Use of the CI was favorable in all tested hearing conditions, even in the SAHNSSD condition, for which SRTs improve by 1.1 to 6.5 dB. Conclusion: Our preliminary results show benefits in speech comprehension in noise with CI, for both noise types and in all hearing conditions from -90° to +90°. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]