Dear all,
I am currently using Oticon Real 1 hearing aids with canal tip molds made of ThermoTec material and 1.4 mm vents. Overall, I am very satisfied with their performance.
However, I have been experiencing some difficulty understanding my soft-spoken girlfriend when we’re outdoors, especially when we are walking side-by-side and she is not facing me. In these situations, clarity tends to drop significantly.
I am considering asking my audiologist to create a dedicated program specifically for these kinds of scenarios. My initial thought is to set microphone directionality to omnidirectional to better capture speech from various angles.
For those familiar with the Oticon Genie software:
Are there any specific setting adjustments you would recommend for this use case?
Besides microphone mode, which other parameters (e.g., noise reduction, wind noise management, speech clarity enhancements) should be considered?
I would really appreciate any input or experiences you can share.
Many thanks and kind regards,
Oliver
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I would appreciate to receive some advice. There are certainly some self-fitters out there who know exactly what to do. @Volusiano ?
What fitting formula are you using?
Some fitting formulas on Genie allow you to increase soft sounds (under sound controls) which could help.
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I am using VAC+ , I do not know whether soft sounds can be increased in VAC+
This sounds so familiar, that was the first sign that I have hearing loss. I struggled listening to my Chinese-born admin!
Oticon (and most default manufacturers fitting model) tend to shoot low the high frequency values. After seeing your audiogram , I can totally understand why you struggle.
I would examine the audiogram (thresholds) vs the gain curve and see how they compare at high frequency values. If you look at the hearing advisor reviews, their initial fit vs tuned fit almost always show the initial fit undershoots high frequencies. My experience with fitters is that they “fix” hearing loss below 4k but tend to disregard anything above that. The 6K and 8k add clarity to speech , specially with ladies with soft high pitch voices.
Pardon my typos , I’ll send some examples later.
I’m answering from my phone but tomorrow I’ll send screen shots of the recommended initial settings in got in my initial firing vs how I tuned it.
I do not think that my high frequencies gain curves are below target - I do not have first fit - I had REM done several times and the curves match well (I unfortunately do not have a picture of the curves to prove it) - I am in general happy with my hearing aids and I can understand my girlfriend well in most other situations - I was just asking for recommendations for adjustments to create a customized outdoor program. Thanks, Oliver
Would you be willing to clip a microphone into her? That would really be the biggest, easiest solution. Oticon connect clip.
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Thank you for this suggestion - I would rather not like to use an external microphone - I do not consider myself so much hearing impaired to justify such measures.
Does your suggestion of using an external microphone mean that no real improvements can be expected from a customized outdoor program?
I use a remote mic and my hearing loss is so mild that half the time I don’t wear hearing aids. It’s more situational than degree of loss related.
I don’t think the reals have use adaptive beam forming. You can try increasing soft and medium gain in speech areas and then fool around with the wind management and sound cleaning to try to hit the sweet spot that’s going to make that better. Helpful to have her beside you for the adjustments.
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VAC+ allows you to set the Soft Sound Perception in Fine Tuning. The other standard rationales don’t So make sure you to in there and set the value accordingly, maybe all the right to Detail.
I don’t think manipulating the directionality of the microphone would help because normally the Oticon already kinda does it on the fly already in the Automatics mode. You definitely don’t want the Fully Directional value, but you can try the Fixed Omni value to force it to open your sound field to 360 degrees always like for when listening to the music. But try Fixed Omni and Neural Automatic to see if it helps or not. If you decide on Neural Automatic, then you can probably just use the default program with the Soft Sound Perception set to Detail and not have to create a special custom program for outdoors.
Make sure to enable the Wind Handling and Stabilizer on, as well as Spatial Noise management and Binaural Broadband.
If all the above don’t help, you can try to create a new program and go in there and try to manually do your own fine tuning to try to find a sweet spot that would enhance your girlfriend’s voice like @neville suggested on top of all the choices above.
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@Volusiano and @Neville, many thanks for your input.
Wind & Handling Stabilizer and Spatial Noise Management are already enabled in my general program. I do not know whether binaural broadband is enabled.
@Volusiano, did I understand this right - there are two options for me?
Option 1: just set the soft sound perception to detail in the general program and remain in neural automatic without the need to generate a second custom program
Option 2: generate a custom outdoor program with fixed omni instead of neural automatic and the soft sound perception in detail
Thank you for your input and kind regards from Vienna,
Oliver
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I would set the Soft Sound Perception to the right most Detail in the general program and remain in neural automatic first to see if that’s enough to not require a dedicated program.
If that still doesn’t help, you can setup a dedicated program, still set Soft Sounc Perception to max Detail, but also try to toggle between Neural Automatic and Fixed Omni to see which one you like better, and if still not happy, start doing some Fine Tuning adjustment to increase the sweet spot of where your girlfriend’s soft sound reside until you’re happy, like @Neville has suggested.
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