I’m about 96.4% ready to pull the trigger on getting set up to self program my aids.
My question is roughly how much does it cost to get set-up?
And does every brand or type of aid require it’s own software for programming… or is there a universal thing that will work weather I have Phonak or Oticon or whatever…
I’ve always been a very hands-on DIY kind of guy, and one of my biggest frustrations these few years of wearing hearing aids is the feeling that they aren’t set quite to their optimum. I have felt like the Audiologist’s experience certainly helped in a big way to speed me along through those initial months getting them dialed in and getting my brain trained for the new input
But at the same time I’ve never really felt like she’s taken the time and effort needed to drill down… it’s a good-enough thing. Especially now that they are long out of “contract”
I’ve always had doubts because she’s never done any of the technical configuration stuff that I’ve read about such as real ear measurement or doing anything with a test box, etc… The most technical thing I’ve seen done is a stethoscope placed onto the receiver so that she can hear what the are doing…and then after some major adjustment, I get the question how is that? while sitting in a relatively quiet office with just the two of us. So my answer is and always has been, hard to say…it’s so quiet in here… It really seems like she’d at least have something set up to simulate common situations to allow for a test run in the office.
I asked her once about REM, and her answer seemed plausible to me, and still does (it was a conversation but to summarize, it had to do with the goal of hearing aids being speech and understanding, and that being more critical than ‘the numbers’. Basically, my takeaway was that REM is more useful with kids who can’t understand or verbalize nuances of understanding and perception. Still, I’m an engineer by schooling and by nature, and I value precision and consistency in the baseline configuration.
I certainly don’t want to get in the weeds of it, but I would like to be able to tweak LITTLE things without having to go through the drama of appointments and delays. (my audi doesn’t use the virtual visit feature in phonak, which I’m sure would reduce this drama significantly!)
I’m also aware that I need to avoid my tendency of getting caught up in analysis paralysis. I don’t really have a desire to do baseline programming and spending loads of time re-programming…and I know it’s not realistic for me to get into DIY REM, etc…
My thought at this point is that since my Marvels have had issues lately and they are getting long in the tooth, I know I’ll need to get a new set fairly soon…so I’ll wait till I know for sure which brand and model I’ll go with next
and I figure that I’ll most likely go to a different audiologist to get them (hopefully one that doesn’t sell under the package business model)
I’m tempted to cut to the chase and buy from direct hearing or similar but I’d prefer to start with a professional baseline set-up
I’m new to the HA and DIY world, but as a retired engineer myself it seems like you are a great candidate to start tweaking. To answer the main question, a NOAHlink wireless programmer is about $150. Once you have new HAs, the helpful folks on this forum will direct you to a location where you can download the correct software for programming and some instruction sheets. You can then start experimenting.
I have approached the process cautiously and still feel that my small adjustments have made an improvement. I’d like them to sound more “natural”, but need to learn more about how to achieve that goal. Good luck.
In my opinion, this is a cop out answer. REM provides the audiologist with actual measurements of how YOUR hearing aid is performing in YOUR ear.
If “the numbers” aren’t critical, they why would she bother entering your audiogram info into the fitting software??? Why not just jam them in your ears and then fiddle with the controls until you stop complaining?
I don’t see REM as the be-all end-all. It shouldn’t be a “set it and forget it”, or “the machine says that these are the right settings for you, so get used to them”. There is still an opportunity for fine tuning. But if my audiologist told me that they could get BETTER results with LESS information, I would definitely see that as an opportunity to question literally everything else they had told me - and to look for another provider.
BunsenH, $150 doesn’t seem so bad for the hardware…Do you have a general idea of the price for the software?
I agree with you Allen, sort of…
but
I thought about it way back then, and there’s two perspectives to view it from…
one being general sound accuracy
and the other being speech understanding.
Seems to me that the overarching goal, by far, in audiology is for speech understanding.
If that is your ONLY goal, then when speech understanding is achieved you are done.
The rest of it is just ‘fluff’
And if the audiologist can be certain that I understand speech without doing REM, then what would it really add?
For me though, hearing sounds at least somewhat accurately is a higher goal than ‘fluff’ so REM seems like it would help at least a little…
but for precise and accurate sound response to really happen, I reckon for starters the audiogram would I think need to be performed at a much higher resolution than they are. There’s so much slop in measuring the thresholds as they are done. Also, there are a whole lot of frequencies that go untested entirely between each data point in a standard audiogram so there is a whole lot of interpolation going on!
Don’t get me wrong…I’m not trying to sell my audiologist’s idea, but I do think that it makes some sense…
Personally I do think that in theory at least the concept of REM as an early step in the fitting process certainly makes sense that it would give a better starting point. I’ve never experienced it though so I can only speculate
Now for really young kids… especially those that can’t even talk yet… yeah I can see where it’s a necessity for them…but for me, I can still remember what things sound like, and I can understand the nuance and explain what I’m hearing and what bothers me…
The software is free. The good folks here on the forum will share it with you. As you probably know now, the Noahlink wireless device is usually available on Amazon or Ebay for $150 to $200.
Small independent audiologists may be reluctant to do REM because of the significant investment they have to make in purchasing the equipment. If you are going to DIY, entering the audiogram in the software is a good start.
Bingo, yeah only you know what and how you want to hear, REM is just another tool in the tool box, your going DIY now so no need to worry about all the other “fluff” you can also do In-situ audiometry within the software as well, can be helpful for some.
Get the Noahlink wireless programming device as this can be used on just about every later models from all the manufacturers ( obviously no good for any non Wireless or older models)
well that is an interesting point…and something that I’ve pondered in the past.
I remember how things should sound… I think anyway. memory is fuzzy as the hearing loss started a long time ago. What I remember could be a little off.
So the question I’ve asked myself. Do I know what/how I want to hear?
or does what I want really even matter?
is the better question do I want to hear it correctly (with precision and accuracy)?
free software… awesome! I guess I can hardly go wrong then! No sense in waiting for my new aids. I might as well start learning now!
I think I’ll go shopping tonight for a Noah link as a Christmas present for myself then.
Then I need to decide if I’m just going to load it onto my daughter’s computer or break down and buy myself a computer too… since I’m sure it won’t run on my chromebook…
What you will also find is there is a whole new world of Second Hand Aids that you are now open to. I had KS10s and bought Paradise and Lumity off eBay.
I will say this tho, a decent Audi is worth every single $ you will spend but have fun experimenting.
Well only you can answer this, no electronic devices can possibly tell you, so you could do a number of things to help you along, pick a favourite song, use a tone generator Online Tone Generator - generate pure tones of any frequency or something else, remember the In-situ audiometry I mentioned, this is a popular way to set up a first fit, but pretty easy to just enter your audogram into the software as well, don’t overthink this, once you get the software installed and play around with the features available you’ll see how easy it is to do, the software does the hard yards for you and is quite easy to navigate through.
Yeah of course you do, this will come down to trial and error, just like in the audiologists clinic, you make some adjustments and then go out into the big wide world and trial them in situations your familiar with, with DIY you can make adjustments when and where it suits you, it doesn’t get any better then that, doing some research/homework before jumping in will make this so much easier for yourself (it’s not hard but still nice to have some basic knowledge )
Depending on which Mac Machine, bootcamp or other virtual machine (Parallels or VMWare Fusion etc) is possible with a few forum members doing this, but as mentioned just got to be careful with the ARM based chips for Noahlink wireless.
Yeah M1 Pro here and I can’t be arsed with a VM and Arm Windows (didn’t realise the Noahlink drivers would fail anyway). I, and a I know a number of audiologists I know, would love a native Mac app. With Rosetta 2 it wouldn’t be hard for them to do but we can guess from their MFI allergy that Phonak are not big Apple fans
Well said, and quite possibly your right, but with LE Audio taking over it’s probably just too much work for them, i think I read something on the forum that Apple will be implementing LE Audio with Auracast capability at some point?
Yes I know. That’s why I said to get a PC! Himsa reminded people of this in their latest info email a couple of days ago, so it’s obviously not something that’s going to be changed soon.
noahlink wireles 2 ordered!
now I have to decide if I’m going to buy a computer or just use my daughter’s for now. I’ll probably just use hers for now at least…Since I don’t plan to reprogram often after an initial learning period.
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