I doubt it because your loss is pretty flat from 1khz and up so there’s really no good audible destination range to compress to.
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Volusiano, that is a lot of my problem as well. The ski slope begins at around 1 KHz. To hear those 2 to 4 KHz frequencies, they would not only need to be compressed, but lowered considerably. The Audiologist I visited said that I should forget about ever hearing anything above 3 KHz, and even the 2 to 3 KHz range would be problematic. My big issue with aids is that when I try to boost the frequencies where I have moderate to severe loss, not the profound range, to audible levels, I get recruitment and the sounds are almost painful. I remember going to a restaurant with some friends and the sound level was just unbearable. I removed the aids and found that it wasn’t loud at all. Sound Recover 2 is about my last hope, and I think even that is fading fast. I can’t afford to just buy a set of aids to try this one feature, which likely won’t improve my hearing anyway.
Any possibility of trying the Brio 3s from Costco on a credit card? That could give you about a month without having to come up with any real money, and up to 6 months with full refund possible. Sound Recover 2 could let you lower high sounds into the 800hz to 2000hz range. Again, whether you like it or not or if lack of high frequencies is causing your difficulties is unknown.
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MDB, The nearest Costco is an hour and a half away and I am not a member. I assume the Brio 3 is actually a Phonak product. Are they programmable by Target? I do self programming.
They are not “locked” and you should be able to program. It would be conceivable to become a member, try out the aids and if you didn’t like them and returned them, to cancel your $60 membership and get it refunded. And yes, the Brio 3 is a Phonak product which is very similar to the Phonak Audeo B.
The OPN has a new frequency lowering technology called Speech Rescue that is very different than Sound Recover 1 and 2. It is more frequency transposition and composition than compression. There is a little bit of compression but it’s minimal compared to Sound Recover 1 & 2. So Sound Recover 2 is not your last hope in the quest to find a frequency lowering technology that may work for you.
Look at my audiogram and you’ll see that I have a very steep ski slope loss. I already gave up on normal amplification above 4 KHz. But with Speech Rescue, I can now hear from 4 to 7 KHz with the Speech Rescue lowest configuration 1 (see pic below) where the 4-7 KHz high frequency range gets lowered to around 1.5 to 2.5 KHz for me to hear. I’m very happy with it. I can even hear cricket sound very clearly now and without Speech Rescue there’s no way I can hear it even with my 105dB receivers because that kind of sound is at the very high 7 KHz range.
You can control the loudness of the added lowered sounds so that the lowered sounds may not affect your recruitment issue too much.
You can also choose to continue to amplify the high end sounds or not to amplify them anymore because you’re already hearing the lowered version of them anyway, especially when no amount of amplification is enough for those high end sounds in the first place in your case (or mine).
With these options above, I can even use my 85dB receivers effectively because I really don’t need to amplify anything above 4 KHz for me anymore. I even set my audiogram to prescribe no amplification above 4 KHz thanks to this, so that I don’t need to stress out my receicers by overdriving them to saturation at those high frequencies all the times.
Yet I can hear sounds up to 7 KHz very well. All the tiny little digital beeps at the very high frequency ends that I didn’t even know exist now come alive to me, from the fridge, the AC controls, even the tiny alarm on my wrist watch which I could never hear before because they put it on such a high frequency as to not suck up too much juice from my tiny watch battery. Mind you, they’re not at their original pitches anymore. They’re at the lower pitches within the 1.5 to 2.5 KHz range. But I’m just happy to be able to hear them even if they’re not at the original pitches anymore.
The OPN is quite a lot of money and I know that you’re looking to save by buying from eBay. But at least that’s an option out there to do a trial using a 30 or 60 day period if you want, just to see what Speech Rescue is like if you find that Sound Recover 2 doesn’t work for you.
The main thing I just want to point out to you here is that Sound Recover 2 is not your last hope like your think it is, to help your hear higher frequencies.
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John, the overarching issue you have is, “what are the boundaries of your cochlear dead zones?”
Ask your audiologist to run the “TEN” (Threshold Equivalent Noise) test to map out the frequency boundaries of where you no longer fall into the conventional SNHL — auditory dys-synchrony (part of the ANSD “spectrum”) domain.
Also, do you have stable or progressive hearing loss; and is the cause genetic? If it’s progressive &/or genetic, you should consider cochlear implants (CI’s) with full electrodes and residual hearing preservation.
I will call the Audiologist and ask if she can run that test, or if she even knows what it is. My hearing loss has been pretty much the same for at least the past few years. I understand that it is common for the hearing to deteriorate some with age, and mine might have, but it doesn’t seem to be getting much worse. There is a genetic component, but I am not sure to what extent it has affected my hearing. My paternal grandfather was profoundly deaf, and my father’s hearing was way worse than mine. I remember him getting some analog type hearing aids, but not using them because they didn’t really do anything for him. I think an implant is out of the question for me because of the cost. Would getting a REM test done be advisable? I know she has the equipment for that. I have negative pressure on my ear drums. Could that be causing some of my problems? The ENT tried various drugs in an effort to reverse it a few years ago, but was unsuccessful. I still have it.
I have lived with hearing loss for so long, it isn’t as big a problem as it would be if I had a sudden hearing loss. I have to have captions turned on to make any sense of TV, and I have to have people repeat things frequently, but it isn’t really something that I even think about a lot.
A less expensive way to get similar frequency lowering technology to OPN would be with Costco’s Bernafon Zerena. This is the kind of stuff you just have to try out. Although my reading/email conversations suggests Sound Recover 2 would be superior for your kind of loss, Volusiano certainly has had impressive results with the OPN.
Unlike hearing aids, CI’s are indeed covered by insurance.
Selecting a Cochlear Implant Surgeon
Excellent point about trying the Bernafon Zerena from Costco to get the similar frequency lowering technology that the OPN has. This is assuming that they’re the same. I just don’t know, but it’s probably likely because they’re sister companies. I reviewed the Sonic Enchant 100, in which case Sonic is also a sister company with Oticon, and their Frequency Transfer technology seems exactly the same as the Oticon Speech Rescue. So If Sonic has the same technology, Bernafon very likely has the same technology as well.
Regarding whether Sound Recover 2 or Speech Rescue is better for the OP, only the OP can tell. But if Sound Recover 2 can compress way down below the 1 KHz range then for sure that’s a lower destination range than the lowest range for Speech Rescue (which is 1.5-2KHz). So that may be an advantage (or not), depending on the kind of hearing loss the particular user has.
From this: 20Q: Frequency Lowering Ten Years Later - New Technology Innovations Joshua M. Alexander 20Q with Gus Mueller Hearing Aids - Adults Hearing Aids - Children VA Selections 18040
Bernafon’s “Frequency Composition” is listed as “similar, but not the same” as Speech Rescue.
It seems the only way to know is to try and see. So, I found a pair of Audeo B50’s on eBay for just over $500. I think I can get my money back if they aren’t effective. They are still the current platform. The extra stuff you get by going to the 90’s didn’t really seem to do anything with the V90’s I currently have anyway. According to the Phonak features page, all the Belong series have Sound Recover 2. I read up on how to fit SR2 and am anxious to try them out. I am not sure whether to put my power receivers on them or not. I might give them a try with the regular ones first. I’ll post my results when I have had time to see if they are going to help. Being on Social Security, I can’t afford to run off to the Audiologist and try expensive aids.
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It has been a few days now. The aids are still in factory warranty until 2020. I don’t know if the warranty is even transferable. Anyway, they have standard receivers, short wires, and power domes. I might switch to open domes. Occlusion doesn’t seem any worse with the power domes. Somehow, I thought that it would. The programming for these seems a good bit different to the V90s. I started a whole new profile for these and used “Audiogram Direct” instead of entering my old audiogram . That is a strange program. It won’t let me test below 250 Hz, and it won’t let me adjust the level high enough in the higher frequencies to hear because they are outside the fitting range of the aids. That given, I used the resultant curve and after trying the various fitting formulas, settled on Phonak Digital. I might play with that some more. I find “Sound Recover 2” a good bit different to the older version. I could tell that the older version was on and working. With SR2, I can’t really tell if it is doing anything or not. At first, I thought these Belong aids were doing a better job than the Venture aids. But, after a few days, they have become annoying just like the Venture aids. I can’t really tell, so far, if they are actually helping my issue of speech intelligibility. The clock on the wall ticks awfully loud now. I am going to go one more day before I make changes to the programming. I have decided that my hearing isn’t as bad as the audiogram would have me believe and by using it at first, I was using way more gain than I needed. I also am not doing anything above 4 kHz. Nothing is going to get that back, so I am just going to forget about it and concentrate on the highest frequencies where I have some hearing left. I’ll be back in a few more days with another post about how things are coming.
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Does the programming software have in-situ audiometry included? If so, you can run it to get a more accurate test of your hearing loss specific to how the hearing aids you’re wearing are amplifying the sound for you. Then represcribe the hearing aid to the in-situ result for more accurate amplification.
I believe that’s what audiogram direct is.
Yes, it sends tones through the aids and otherwise works a lot like a conventional audiogram. You have a choice whether to enter audiogram data, or use the Audiogram Direct data. Which is what I did. Like I said, it has some pecularities. They do say to do it in a quiet setting. Mine wasn’t all that quiet, but I think I got good results. It seems like it can also measure the level at which things become uncomfortable. I wasn’t able to do that because the aids couldn’t put out enough sound. I was interested in that because loud noises seem to bother me a lot more than they did. I read somewhere that people with high frequency loss have a much reduced dynamic range. I can believe that.
You could probably create kind of a mixed audiogram using info from Audiogram Direct and your official audiogram (highs that Audiogram Direct won’t go high enough for) and make guesses at UCL if your audiogram didn’t include that. Ideally you wouldn’t notice Sound Recover 2 except for being able to detect higher frequency sounds, but without the distortion that Sound Recover would create. To me it sounds promising, but will likely involve a lot of trial and error.
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I don’t know about your programming software, but Genie 2 for the OPN which I wear seems to be able to combine the official audiogram and the in-situ audiogram. So the UCL values in my official audiogram still do get used (Genie 2’s in-situ audiometry doesn’t have UCL measurement capability anyway). For example, if I only use the in-situ to measure one side only, then it can represcribe for that one side and continue to use the official audiogram for the other side.
It has been a while since I posted an update on how “Sound Recover 2” is working. It isn’t. I have quit wearing my aids because they don’t help my problem and only annoy me. I turned the sound recover 2 up to maximum but couldn’t tell that it did much. Sometimes, people speaking on TV would sound like they had a lisp, but out in the real world I still have as much difficulty understanding people as ever. I think I just waited about thirty years too long to consider getting aids. I am used to the way the world sounds without all those high frequencies. I did have an incident the other day that gave me pause. I was walking about 3 miles from home in a somewhat remote wooded area and came across a rattlesnake. I could see his rattles shaking out their warning, but could not hear them. I was glad I saw him before I got too close. I gave him a wide berth and continued on my way. But it did make me think a bit about what I can’t now hear.