OK, this is probably a paranoid question, but I’ve had my hearing aids for a couple months, and am in the habit of opening up the battery compartment when not wearing them. But a couple of times, when I knew they’d only be out of my ears for a couple hours or so, I left the battery compartment closed. Just the other day a fear struck me. With those hearing aids powered up, but not in my ears, they were probably creating all kinds of feedback loops from whatever sounds were happening in the room they were in. Can feedback loops cause damage to any part of the hearing aid?
My thoughts are that it would be hard on your battery, but the HA should have the smarts to limit output to avoid damaging itself. I find on mine that when I pull them out they may squeak for a few seconds but then stop. I presume the feedback management kicks in.
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I’ve wondered the same myself. I have rechargeable ReSound Quattro’s. The hard plastic charging case has two slots on either side for the HA bodies and a large bay in the center to hold the receivers and the wires when the HA’s are being charged. I thought: "How convenient! When I don’t want to charge the HA’s, the whole of both HA’s will fit in the center bay, I can close the lid, and use the charger as a carrying case.
The irony of this is that I can’t hear high frequencies very well without my HA’s. Several months go by and one day my wife says, “Don’t you hear a high-pitched squeal?!” My answer: “No? Why!” So I find out that it’s feedback that must have gone on for hours on end during whatever number of days that I put the HA’s in the charger case bay while still on to store them when not in use-too lazy to turn them off, e.g., while showering and dressing to go out, for example.
In my case, the HA’s did not damp themselves down. They were in a perfect hard plastic resonance chamber and from the sound of the loud squeal, which I finally heard in close to full glory by putting one HA in and leaving the other in the charger bay, the feedback must have been going on at close to the max output of the HA at that frequency. It was a really loud almost painful sound if one put one’s ear right up to the bay opening. I don’t think vibrating like that for an hour or two at a time can be good for the receiver in the long run. Fortunately, I found out and stopped testing the HA endurance to feedback.
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I would think feedback would have more chance of damaging your ears than damaging the HA. The receivers/speakers in the HA are engineered to deliver significant sound pressure over long periods of time. They should be able to take it.
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HA receivers, just like audio speakers, do fail. It would be interesting to know what the MTBF is in hours for a HA receiver operating at its MPO over its entire frequency range (not exactly a measure of anything in the real world but certainly an extreme test of output duress). I should imagine, unlike hard disk makers or SSD makers, HA OEM’s are not prone to advertise such statistics. But if you look over the forum, receiver failure is a common complaint - but much of that probably has to do with broken wires, clogging with ear debris, etc. For the uncertainty I have in durability, I try to avoid generating feedback as much as possible.
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They can be if I throw them across the room. Feedback can be annoying. But it is adjustable by
software by your provider.
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If you wear occluding molds as I do, feedback control can be desirably relaxed a lot - allows you to hear loud sounds up to your prescription and the MPO. So when out of my ears, my HA’s are primed to generate a lot of feedback - it’s not “in the ears” that’s a potential concern for me but putting them in my charger case bay or happening to put them down in a “69” position, etc.
Thanks for all these replies, folks. Helpful.
I just put mine on mute when I’m only going to have them out for a short while.