Sure! As I mentioned, you will need your latest audiogram, custom molds, and a good sense of sound intensity. I must warn you that I am not an audiologist, and this “method” is a QUALITATIVE tool. It helped me greatly, but it may be completely useless to you. Here it goes:
- Input your audiogram and choose the fitting formula you are most comfortable with. I tried all of them and at this point I am using NAL-NL2.
- Let the software prescribe your gains. I wear Oticon More, so Genie 2 prescribes gains in 24 bands for me.
- Make a copy of that program (Test Program). In this copy, adjust the soft and loud curves to match exactly the moderate curve. Hence, you are going to have a program with linear compression.
- Now that you have a program with linear compression, disable all the digital features in this program (feedback management, noise suppression, etc.). You don’t have to do anything to the original program yet.
- Save the session, get your phone, choose the program you made in steps 3 & 4 (Test Program), and stream pure tones to your hearing aid (you may want to use a good audio monitor instead if you own one). I use this webpage. Go through all the bands of your hearing aid. In my case, all 24 of them. You want to check whether each of these frequencies is at the same intensity in your right and left ears. Take note of any perceived differences so you can adjust them in the software later.
- Go back to the software and the Test Program and adjust accordingly so you have the perfect balance between your right and left ears. You may need to do steps 5 & 6 a few times until you get it right.
- When you are done, make a copy of the Test Program. Now you are going to have 3 programs: P1 (the initial one), P2 (Test Program), and P3 (copy of Test Program). Adjust the left and right ears separately. For each frequency, proceed this way:
a. Go to P1 and note the compression ratio between moderate-loud and soft-moderate.
b. Adjust the gains in P3 for the soft and loud curves so you have the same compression ratio as P1.
c. Do step a & b for all frequencies and both ears. Do not adjust the gain of the moderate curve.
That would probably yield a reasonable program for you. However, if you are still not happy with it, you may tweak it here and there accordingly. I take another step, which you may find useful or not.
- Stream a “normalized” audio file with pure tones to your P2 (Test Program). I use this one. This audio takes into consideration the “equal-loudness contour standard” (read here). Since at this point you probably have a good balance between your right and left ears, now you want to check whether there are any quiet or loud frequencies. Just listen to the audio and take note of the frequencies that need to be adjusted. Go back to the software and adjust them on P2. When you are done with step 8, go back to step 7 and do it again.
When you are done tweaking your P3, just enable back all the digital features you need to and make it your P1. From this P1, you can tweak programs for speech in noise, music, etc.