I’ve recently had my hearing aids (Phonak Audéo Marvel) adjusted to my new audiogram. The changes from my last audiogram weren’t particularly big, but the hearing aids seem to be a lot more prone to feedback after the adjustment. Not only do the hearing aids actually feedback when something comes to close to my ears, I also have this weird feeling of various sounds bringing the hearing aids close to feedback (like they are trying to supress feedback). The latter might be totally in my head though, I’m finding these new hearing aids settings surprisingly difficult to adjust to. Anyway, my question is: Might it be that the amplification needed is pushing the limits of what is possible to achieve with open domes without constant feedback? I do like my open domes, but would of course be prepared to try something else if that would give better sound quality/make the hearing aids less prone to feeback.
I would guess that open domes are a thing of the past for you. With a precipitous loss like yours, feedback can be a real issue. I would try closed or partially closed domes, I think you will like it.
You need to try closed domes in order to reduce feedback.
Thanks for the replies. Do you think that it’s predominantly the amplification at 6000 & 8000 Hz that’s causing the feedback or the amplification at 1500/2000 Hz? If it’s the former a solution could be to just turn the amplification off at those frequencies (I don’t hear pure tones at 6/8000 Hz, just a buzzing sound, so no useable hearing at the highest frequencies).
Have you considered using Sound Recover, frequency lowering to help with those upper frequencies?
It sure might fix your feedback issues.
I’ve tried it, but we couldn’t make it work (some high frequency sounds were still inaudible, others sounded weird).
Something I have tried is manually lowering or turning off the gain on certain frequencies. This is not nessassary if you get aggressive with Sound recover.
Another idea that I recommend is to increase the sound recover settings until you start lisping the S sound. This will be a more aggressive setting than Target automatically sets SR to. Then back the SR setting off just a little to stop the lisping S. What this will do is automatically lower gains or turn them off in the upper frequencies
These settings will sound strange most likely but with some time you will learn and adjust to the new sounds. Everything will be normal to you plus you will hear things you haven’t heard in a while. This is from my experience. Amazing technology.
Good luck with this.
The 1st step is to get custom earmolds for that degree hearing loss.
You may find , as @Raudrive posted, Sound Recover may be of real benefit to you.
Feedback has typically been in the 2500 - 3500 Hz range. That is also where most intelligibility is in human speech. In the older days a notch filter was used to reduce feedback but all it really did was reduce the amplification in the most important area. No feedback but could not understand as well, not a good trade off. The sound recover suggestion is certainly a good one. You have no usable hearing out at 6 - 8KHz so I would not even try to amplify that area.
When I got my current hearing aids (Phonak Audéo Marvel) in 2021 I did try Sound recover, with the same kind of strategy that you describe: going for an aggressive setting and then dialing it back. I had high motivation to make it work: having no usable hearing in the high frequencies and a ski-slope that is slowly moving to the left I figured this would be ideal for me. My brain was not happy with this though, and after a few adjustments we gave up. For example, weren’t able to find a setting were S-sounds were audible but not lisping. I did do a bit of reading about Sound recover back then (as a university employee I have access to scientific papers), but my impression was that it seemed to be a bit hit and miss. I asked my audiologist about it again at my most recent appointment and he said that his experience was that for some people it was very difficult/impossible to get it to work.
I got to thinking I might be getting pushy about it. I didn’t mean to be pushy, just trying to help.
When my upper frequencies got so bad that I was losing word understanding I tried Sound Recover aggressively. For me it was a blessing and over a couple or three months I got a bunch of word understanding back. Had my hearing not continued to worsen I would still be with aids and Sound Recover.
As mentioned you are getting feedback in the usable speech frequencies. My thoughts on that are better acoustics using double domes or custom ear molds should help with this.
Good luck with this.
Let us know how it goes.
I didn’t take it as pushy, not at all, and I’m really grateful for your help. It would be great could I get Sound recover to work, but for now I think I’ll suggest to the audiologist that the highest frequencies are turned off and that I try a different kind of dome. I’ve had a custom ear mold before on one ear, when the feedback cancellation wasn’t as effective as it is now, but would like to stay with domes as long as possible. My word recognition scores are still good (over 80%), but I suspect that it doesn’t take much of a worsening of the hearing for them to start go.
My audiogram is almost similar to yours but more steeply sloped. I agree you the open domes will make feedback worse. I went for earmolds in the end as having power domes was too occluding and will never go back to domes now. I would honestly give earmolds a try but if you want to stay with domes then like others have suggested, partially open domes or power dome. You might find these occluding though and may not give you as much amplification as earmolds would.
I tried a power dome on my worse ear a few years ago and did not like it at all. After that I got a custom mold with a large vent, which worked well. However, when I got my current hearing aids they had better feedback control and open domes worked fine - until last week’s adjustment that is. The audiogram hadn’t changed a lot, but I had lost 15 dB on 1500 Hz in my best ear and there are also some changes of 5 or 10 dB in other frequencies. Maybe this is what pushed the feedback control over the limit.
Went back to the audiologist a few days ago and with some adjustments he did get rid of the feedback (turned out that it was the increased amplification at 1500/2000 Hz that had pushed the feedback control over the limit). Mostly happy with the way the hearing aids function in the quiet, still struggling a lot in noise, we’ll see if it’s possible to do something about that, but I do understand that the odds are probably not on my side.