Disturbing sounds and own voice perception

Hearing Aids
1

Hello everyone,

I am an audiologist who is wondering about your experiences with disturbance and perception of hearing aid sounds.

There are very few proper studies about subjective perception of sounds with hearing aids, which is outrageous.

So I turn to you in the hopes of learning more about this.

I am wondering:

Did you have discomfort due to the new sounds of your hearing aids?

If yes - what kind of sounds disturbed you, in what way?

Did the perception of the sounds change with time? Did the disturbance change with time?

Did you or your audiologist make any adjustment to the hearing aids to reduce the annoying sounds?

I am especially curious to know if anyone at fist really disliked the way the hearing aid sounded, or was very uncomfortable by disturbing sounds, and had this change by itself just by using the hearing aids.

I.e.: have any of you gone from bothered by the sounds to not being bothered without making any adjustments?

3 Likes
2

Keyboards & running water. Keyboard keys in particular drove me a bit batty. My audio dulled it … a little & then 2-3 months later adjust to full script. That was my first set of aids & yes over time & somewhat easing into the new perception got me through. My second set - they were set to full script from day one with no issues.

3

Initially running water, toilet flushing and sounds of clanking dishes and pots and pans were very annoying. I got used to it with no hearing aid adjustment.

4

I find the way hearing aids process sound very annoying. As a blind person who relies on hearing to understand and react to the world around me, I don’t want the hearing aids telling me what they think I should or should not be hearing. I need to know everyhting that’s happening around me. Some of the things that really annoy me:

Compression of different frequency bands, i.e. the HA hears a loud sound and then slams down the volume so that my sonic world goes away. I’m walking in the city, someone drops something big, suddenly all the cars go quiet because the volume ducks.

Comb effect: the delay caused by processing, giving voices and sounds a robotic effect. Widex Pure sort of deals with this but you cannot make many band adjustments in the programs if you have this mode switched on. This delay comb effect causes my sense of direction to get messed up.

warble or altering of the sound to try and block feedback. This is a really hard one, you do sometimes need feedback managers, but some deal with the sound a lot more harshly than others and so single notes of music for example warble and tremble, even in a music program. Oticon are particularly bad for this. Phonak deal with it better. Widex feedback management is quite frankly not great, but I think that’s because they prefer you turn it off which I do anyway :slight_smile: Starkey tends to make things sound really weird and mettalic.

Bias towards high frequencies. I get it, most people lose high freqs, ehnce most HA’s kater to that. However as someone with low freq loss, I find even in neutral the HA’s make everything sound too bright. Phonak are especially bad for this.

sound expansion: Yes, even though you can turn this off, some models of Starkey and Phonak lumitys you can’t ever really get rid of this. What happens, is the HA’s pick up a soft sound and amplify it really quickly. A good example, walk into a medium sized room and clap. The clap of the echo is very short, but the Ha grabs this and tries to pull it up to an audible level. we tried everything in the book to turn it off and it did not work, so you get some very weird processing artefacts as a result.

Think that’s all for now, my main ask of hearing aids is just let me have as pure an analogue sound as I can. Yes we can have all this AI and noise reduction etc etc, but let me turn it all off for my day to day use. Let me decide what is too loud and what I can hear :slight_smile:

5

Yeah, my audiologist said it would be better if I could tolerate getting through the sharp noises all at once. She welcomed me telling her it was too much if I needed to, but really encouraged me to tough it out. I’m glad I did, but can understand others not being able to do so.

WH

6

I’ve worn hearing aids for over 20 years.

My current pair are Phonak Audeo Paradise P90R;s For the first 2 years I’ve complained about being unable to understand speech in noise. Work (construction); Home (in the flight path of an international airport, with aircraft on final 1,000 feet overhead.)

Noise hurt. Last fitting session the fitter responded. My hearing aids are much more comfortable.

These aren’t new hearing aids…however, the issue was newly resolved and could have been solved by the dispensing audi when the hearing aids were obtained.