Hi,
I have finally taken the plunge and had aids fitted. Having had no more than a little time with two different hearing aids in the store, I decided to go with the recommendation and I’m now the owner of a couple of ReSound Forzas.
I am surprised at how easily my brain is getting used to having the aids. After a couple of days I would not notice them that much, and now that I’m 3 weeks into it, I’m forgetting them for most of the day. And after the initial shock of there’s-way-too-much-noise-everywhere, I’m enjoying having hearing aids.
But one thing I’m not too happy with. I’m hearing distortions. When it is not noisy and someone speaks at a pronounced voice, it sounds as if the voice is clipping. This also happens if I speak. The distortion is so pronounced that I sometimes have a hard time hearing what they actually say. Think of a hardrock guitar at a rock concert and you’ll understand what effect I’m referring to.
I can also hear what would best be described as a low volume static noise. It happens when I’m in a quiet room and people talk normally, like in a meeting room. When someone talks, I can hear their voice, but also a static noise like an AM radio between stations at a much lower volume. When the person stops speaking, the noise stops too. This is very distracting. I don’t notice it when there are background noises.
I don’t think my ears are doing the distorting. We did a test to see how loud a noise I could tolerate and nothing the fitter dared to output through the headphones even came close to hurting or sounding distorted. I guess there’s one benefit to conductive hearing loss.
We tried after the first week to dial back the gain and allow the aid to produce more output (I forgot the term), and that reduced the clipping effect a bit, but also made it much harder for me to understand what people were saying.
Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? Is it something that is part of the settings? Do all compressing digital hearing aids do this to some extend? Are my aids malfunctioning? Do I need a different brand/model for my loss?
Lots of questions and I was hoping that someone here has run into this problem. Or at least can let me know what the best course of action would be.
Thanks in advance!