Hi Malcolm, I had a colleague ask about a similar problem a little while ago. I think cortical responses will be hard to see in single trials so IMO the question sort of becomes “how many trial/stimulus averages do you need to accumulate to see classic responses?” which is probably roughly related to whatever the SNR of your neural recorder is. ABRs are a good avenue modulo good comments about if what they reflect is what you’re interested in. IIRC they also require averaging thousands of trials. More standard ERPs normally average 50-100, but you might be able to get away with less? Luckily I don’t think the stimuli need to be very long: probably a jittered train of say 300 ms sounds (I’d probably go speech vowels or wide band noise) every second or so should do it so you can probably get a good set of trials to explore this pretty quickly. We sometimes use that “how many averages needed to see a classic component” as an approximation of neural SNR so you could see how many trials you need to accumulate to see something to get a more precise/efficient measure. Hope this helps!