Background noise issue with Philips 9030 TR

Just purchased the Philips 9030 TR and the background noise seems to overpower voice. I tried all 4 of the Program modes and can’t tell any difference in removing the background noise. It seems like the high freq sounds overpower everything. When talking outside with a neighbor I heard the highway sounds 1/2 mile away better than him 7 feet away. Also I have the closed dome and didn’t know if the open dome would help (don’t like the feel of the closed dome). The hearing aid I replaced were the Kirkland that quite working after 5 years. When in a quiet room the Philips work great and the voice sound is better than the Kirkland. Were they supposed to manually program (4) Normal/Noise/Movie/car individually?? Thanks for any help.

You should post your audiogram in your profile (a headphone indicator next to your avatar) so we can tell what kind of hearing loss you have in the first place.

Do a search on this forum for threads about the Philips 9030, there should be a number of them. My impression when I followed those threads is that the Philips 9030 excels in noise removal for speech in noise clarity. It actually has an AI (artificial intelligence) module inside that specializes noise removal from speech.

Have you worked with the HCP to address the issue yet? What did they say?

How do I check that?!

Thanks for the response.

Have the person who fitted it for you at Costco tell you.

Checked with Costco and the fitter said it was automatic without being turned on??

What a lazy answer the Costco fitter gave you. The least they should do is ask you to come in to go over your settings in more details to see how things are currently set for you and what more can be done for you, instead of brushing you off with “It’s automatic and doesn’t have to be turned on” answer.

I’m not your fitter and I’m a stranger to you, but I’ll take the time to show you the various settings for in the Philips HearSuite software that you can educate yourself on so you can make an appointment with your Costco fitter and review your settings to see how things are set, and change anything you want in there.

The first 2 screenshots below are the various parameters that can be set and some of them are specific for noise reduction. The left and right sides are duplicates because they’re for the left and right ears, that’s all.

At the bottom are the Help explanations of what each of the parameters are so you understand them better. Notice that the whole Feature page has to be captured in 2 screenshots so you’ll see some overlap in the middle (the Noise Reduction Mode and the Speech Clarifier).

Review this to understand what all the parameters do and decide how you want them to be set, print it out, make an appointment with your Costco fitter, have them show you the screen on how your parameters are currently being set, and ask them to change any of the parameters you’d like to change to help improve your noise reduction. Generally for the noise reduction stuff, set them to High or Max if not already set to those values should help with maximizing the noise control parameters to help you out.

Note that if you’re not an experience HA wearer (you didn’t say if this is the first pair of HAs for you or not), everything may sound overwhelming at first and the “noise” may be less over powering to you as you start getting used to everything. But if you’re an experience HA wearer, just new with the Philips, then maybe the Costco fitter didn’t program the settings to be aggressive enough for you on the noise control front.





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Wow- Thanks for the great information. I am going to set another appointment to have the settings checked. Now I know what I am looking at on the screens. Thanks for going into such great detail. This is my second set of HA (Had the Kirkland for 5 years and never had the issues I am having now). Hopefully these changes in the settings will fix the issues.

thanks again

It goes without saying that mine is just an example with 2 programs. You mentioned that you have 4. Of course the parameters on each of the 4 programs may be set differently based on the nature of the design for that program, so maybe you can leave the settings in the built-in programs alone, and only start changing the parameters for the default program that you’ll be using the most for now.

Of course you can adjust the parameters of the other built-in programs, too, but that may take away some of the intended effect of the built-in programs, so you only want to adjust the parameters for those programs judiciously and be sure about what you want to change there.

Went back to Costco and had the programs adjusted and noticed a big difference. Much better. will go back in two weeks to fine tune and decide whether to change to the open dome buds. Thanks for all the recommendations.

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Glad to read about your progress. That’s what it’s all about - progress, not perfection.

The open or closed dome issue could be better addressed if you posted your audiogram as previously requested. I can tell you that the closed dome does take some getting used to

Volusiano - Thank you for posting the fitting screens. This information helps us communicate more effectively to the fitters.

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