Time to vent a little! About six months ago received a pair of Phonak Naida S IX CRT’s from the VA and I am thankful for that benefit. But I am frustrated with my inability to vocalize to audiologists/hearing aid technicians what I am hearing or not hearing. The audi at the VA always seems to think she has solved the problem but when I go out in the world it is not. She seems to be afraid to make any major adjustments and the miniscule adjustments don’t do it. I thought I had struck gold when I located a local Phonak distributor who graciously agreed to adjust at no charge. She is a “Technician”. She is helpful but after three visits I still have issues. This is my fourth set of hearing aids in about 12 years (and four distributors) and my experience is much the same in each case. So, I guess its my inability to lay out in clear language what I need. Strange that I have never had that problem in other areas of my life.
I would love to be able to “tweak” these babies myself. Thanks for reading my rant (or not)
Word Recognition: 28% @80db L&R
Let me guess, You are looking for the hearing aids to be clearer? No matter what happens, it’s ‘okay’ in quiet but the moment there is any noise, it’s about a million times more difficult (or near impossible)??? Root cause is that discrim score above. No matter what hearing aid you get, it’s only going to sound as good as your ear is capable of. It’s one of those things I hate to tell patients when they ask if I can make it better…saying ‘no’ when they’ve plunked down money (and even after I’ve gone over the results to detail what is and is not realistic) is hard to say and I’m sure very hard to hear. When I have patients who have tried umpteen hearing aids in 10-15 years with the same results, typically we start looking at the auditory system as the cause for the lack of benefit and not so much the hearing aids. I’m not trying to be nasty or say “It’s your fault”, but fully understanding what your particular auditory system is capable of is crucial when trying to determine hearing aid success.
Now, if your issues are other than clarity, list them on here and let some of us take a stab and see if we can provide something others haven’t come up with.
I agree with DocAudio, unfortunately the problems you’re describing are probably due to your poor word discrimination. You would probably benefit from accessories to help you hear better in difficult situations, such as FM or companion microphones.
I believe the golden rule is to use any means to get the original sound source as close to your ears as possible . This means using streamers, microphones, and FM technologies to enhance your hearing aids . I think we need to think about a systems approach to hearing better.
But it is also important to regard the brain as part of the system. You might try the LACE program to improve discrimination, work on lipreading skills, and listen to music whenever it is not important to listen to external environment.
Thanks for all comments. Doc Audio, I appreciate what you are saying and I know my speech discrimination is poor and the cause of many problems. However, the reason for my unfortunate rant is I feel like I am not getting the full benefit of these marvelous examples of technology. For example: one of the programs I have is “Stereo Zoom” which is for hearing in noisy places. My first complaint was: voices were not coming through the noise. Adjustment: now the voices are VERY loud but the automatic program (everyday use) is muffled. Adjustment: voices STILL very loud and not focused on the person who is talking directly to me but picking up all surrounding voices. Automatic program is somewhat better. Like everyone knows, what you hear in the quiet office of the audiologist and what you hear in the real world are too completely different things.
I do want to say again how grateful I am to the VA for the benefit of receiving these expensive instruments.(Naida S IX CRT)
Okay, yes those do seem more like programming issues…so that’s good, something that should be able to be improved upon.
Changes to StereoZoom program settings should not effect the automatic program…so if they are, then something isn’t adding up. It’s possible that whoever is changing the settings is doing it from the base/automatic program and not within the StereoZoom program itself. In StereoZoom you definitely shouldn’t be hearing everyone BUT the person in front of you. It’s a very narrow field of focus (30degrees) so if you’re not hearing them but everyone outside that range, somewhere the settings got switched around. Is it possible that whoever adjusted them accidentally put into the setting Zoom Control? That might explain hearing a bunch of conversations around you and not specifically the one in front of you.
I have had a tremendous amount of success with these, so if you can get someone who is really proficient in using the Target software, you should be able to get these issues ironed out.
contact the chief of audiology and explain your problem and ask to see someone else. I did and I now I see the chief of audiology. Remain clam and polite while moving up the chain of command they are all over work with no relief in sight. Also, ask the chief if they think inviting the Phonak Rep to be there at your next appt would be a good idea.
That sounds exactly like what is happening. Next appointment I will be a little better informed. Thank you very much!
I don’t know if this will help, but in the Phonak iPfg software you can download a whole loss of sound scenarios and then use these to tune your hearing aid responses. It’s a far better way of tuning them than having the audiologist try to guess what problem you’re describing and apply what they think might be a fix. For some reason none of the audiologist I have used know about this function, let alone use it.
Huh, I ALWAYS play the sound files, especially to demonstrate how the aids will act in background noise or what music will sound like.
You are one of the good ones then 
I have had to tell three of the four audiologists that I have used about the availability of this feature. It doesn’t fill me with confidence about the rest of their ability if they haven’t bothered to learn the capabilities of one of the tools for the job.