Earmolds with two waxgaurds

[Booster]

I have searched all over and can’t find any information related to how they made my earmolds.

Long time HA wearer and self programmer but first times with earmolds. Used with Nexia 9 aids with speakers in the earmold.

I have flaky and dry ears that shed little flakes most of the time. The earmolds have a waxgaurd that has the flange not recessed into the mold. The collect debris like a scraper would on insertion. Small convoluted canals so not particularly easy to get in and out.

The speaker is further out in the mold, with maybe 1/4" gap to end of the mold where the waxgaurd is.

Odd thing to me is that there is a waxgaurd in the speaker also, so 2 guards in each mold. Since the outer ones get plugged regularly it would seem that it might better to remove them and have just the hole which would be pretty easy to clean out, maybe with vacuum or small probe.

I have to carry waxguards with me as often if I have to change batteries they plug when I put them back in, which is real pain to deal with.

Audi didn’t have much to say except the standard “don’t change anything” line.

Anybody else have two waxguards or molds with speakers recessed and just a open hole to the end of the mold?

[mr.smithster]

Do the molds have RESOUND writtrn on them?
Mine only have one wax guard at the receiver.

[user490]

Some Demant molds also use two wax guards. I assume it’s been tested and possibly highlights a usefulness to REM, but does the added wax guard deminish the speaker effectiveness?

If you have a lot of wax wouldn’t you want the protection for the receiver? Have you used a Jodi-vac? That might help you keep the inner wax guard clean so you don’t have to change it too often.

[mr.smithster]

Here is a picture of mine. Maybe post of pic of yours? You can see my wax guard is the white thingy on the receiver.

[Booster]

They do say Resound SF3-MP 24054614 and are acrylic, yours look to be silicone.

My “wax” is really not waxy at all as it is dry skin flaking off like big dandruff. It is result of a both ears infection I got about 20 years ago on a trip to Taiwan for business. Came from the shower water I have been told.

I am not really too worried about the speaker as it is a long ways away so lots of room to pick out any of the dry stuff, like I do with the vent. I have been looking at the vaccums and also think I will try the “solder sucker” manual one that I have here already from other projects. It would be nice not to have drag along another piece of equipment when we travel and sucker is very small by comparison and no power needed.

I don’t know if this forum has a minimum number of posts before you can post pix, but I will give it a try.

FYI, I have been learning a whole lot about what is good and bad with all the automatic corrections and helpers that the Nexia 9s have. Using Smart Fit. Right now it appears that they have too many of them to work effectively together in various situations as they kind of fight each other sometimes, but still testing all the different combinations. When I am spot on for programing at home in the quiet, I can tell if the wax guard is even 1/4 plugged from the frequency shift.

[Booster]

First shot at a pic

[mr.smithster]

That is an interesting mold. I had another one that wasnt a skeleton type but had a small “leg” for retention and was acrylic but kept backing out. Tried the same style in silicone but still backed out. My silicone skeleton type stays put incredibly well. My says… 24076604 SF3HP.

HP = high power receiver
MP = medium power receiver

Can you post your audiogram?
I also dabble in SmartFit but since my aids are new im giving them a chance to adjust them a few times before i dive in due to my audi not appreciating me self adjusting. As you know, SmartFit stores a log every time you sync your aids so no way to hide when i use SmartFit.

I also believe the All Around program fights itself at times. I was getting shifting sounds and strange suppression in one or the other aid at times, like it gets confused and takes 5-10 seconds to correct itself and decide how to decipher what i should and shouldnt be hearing. I have found the Outdoor program eliminates that internal confusion. So i asked the audi to change directionality to Omni and copied some of the Outdoor settings over to the All Around program and much improved for my loss, with no weird shifting sounds and is more stable now.
They still really bad with wind noise and my audi doesnt want to adjust the Environmental Optimizer settings saying it will decrease speech comprehension, but i would like to experiment around and see for myself. I’ve had 3 adjustments since I got them and am actually pleased with them, althought they are not a huge improvement over my 3 year old Resound One 9’s.
Have you only adjusted in SmartFit or have you tried various formulas and self fit from scratch?

[user490]

You can’t disable the logs with SmartFit enabled?

[Booster]

I will grab screenshot of the audiogram that loaded from the aids at the first install.

Yep, I have done several dozen different programs to test what does what over the month since I got Smart Fit up and running. I do have about 15 years experience with America Hears home programming, though, but it wasn’t as complex or versatile.

I did use the program that the audi put in because it was what I would consider a very well done fit. This was from Mayo Clinic in Rochester where all the staff is stellar, so no surprise. I got in there as I was getting an evaluation for cochlear implants, but I only qualified on one ear and they thoughts aids might buy time until they both qualified. The audi had access to the 4 hour comprehensive hearing evaluation that they do for cochlear, and did in ear mic evaluation at final fit to take out ear canal oddities. I tweaked off that but saved it so I could go back and try other paths of testing.

I am far from done at this point, but my current top program is using Hear in Noise, fixed directional mic, one notch up of noise suppression, no wind, no Environmental Optimizer (with it’s 3-4 second delay that hoses up everything). I then tweaked gains and max output to best hearing in quiet. It is far away the best I have heard in a long, long time. As soon as you get away from the fancy directional side to side changes (fixed directional), the echo almost completely goes away, and echo was a big deal for me. I was at Home Depot today in moderate noise and it still was quite good. Not so good at very noisy Menards that have their air handlers inside on the roof instead of outside. I just made a duplicate program to the good one to compare the fixed directional to soft switching which is claimed will slowly switch from Fixed Directional to Omni. That might help at places like Menards.

They do have an issue with wind. I was running Front Focus a while ago as it was pretty good, but when I road my (pedal) bike the air gets directed right over the aids by the helmet, causing noise. My old aids were pretty linear in increase, but these went nuts and generated an intolerable roaring noise on both sides. If I turned off one of them, it went to very low sound, so it appears the cross connection plus front focus (and maybe other settings) totally messing up. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet with Fixed Directional, but want to as I think it will be better. On the bike, I don’t need to have speech understanding much, but do need to be able the hear and locate traffic so an odd application.

The logs are very useful because you can add notes of what you are testing so I wouldn’t want to shut them off. They only save changes if you tell it to and then it creates a new log point that you can get back to later.

Over the 15 years I used America Hears, every time the put out higher tech aids, they seemed to get worse for me, and these are showing similar. It is very possible the Nexia 5 would do as well or better, based on what I am seeing of the advanced features.

[tenkan]

Why as in what for? You don’t need to worry about the log/time stamp difference.

[Booster]

This a screenshot of what Smart Fit is showing