I have been experiencing vibration and some distortion in the sound of my guitars, both electric and acoustic. I am a quiet jazz player and do not create distortion with amplifier volume or pedals. The distortion is evident whether the guitar is plugged-in to an amplifier or not. I have dismantled some guitars to find out what is causing vibration but there is nothing.
I have noted on some forum comments elsewhere that distortion is common with musicians using hearing aids. Can anybody offer advice on how to reduce or eliminate the distortion?
Many thanks
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I feel your pain Cliffography!
Iāve been a guitar player since 1973 and a guitar tech since 2007.
I found the same thing with my hearing aids. The issue for me is that digital hearing aids have an inherent processing delay. This puts the sound that you hear naturally, and the sound that the hearing aids produce out-of-phase.
In a nutshell, your ears are receiving the sound of the guitar from 2 different sources with a slight delay between them.
In my case the sound I get is a bit like fret buzz or a sitar sound with higher notes and a bit of a growl with the lower ones.
This MAY be what you are experiencing.
Do a search for warble here on the forum.
Build a music program that has little to no digital noise reduction, echo control, etc
The idea is to get your digital aids closer to analog on this music program.
This subject has been talked about a bunch. Musicians should chime in to help you.
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I feel your pain, too, cliffography. I second Raudrives idea: create a program with the least amount of digital manipulation. Turn off as many features as you can, including feedback control. Lower compression if you can.
I have to wonder if more musicians with hearing loss would like the Lyric. It resides close to the eardrum (minimal power needed) and produces analogue sound.
My second thought is that Iād love to see an analogue hearing aid made specifically for music. It wouldnāt excel at speech, but would come with ānaturalā and unaltered sound. An improved version of what used to exist before 1990.
Hi, yes, I am familiar with the delay issue which was extreme on my original Oticon hearing aids.
The delay is largely eliminated with the Widex hearing aids that I have had for almost a year. The guitar vibration/distortion is troublesome continues however. I am not even sure I am hearing what the guitars really sound like.
I have read on another forum that there is a āPureā audio program that can control the settings/algorithm and eliminate the inbuilt program of the hearing aids. There is suggestion that a āpureā program setting (ie no compression etc) will give a more natural response. I wonder if anybody has heard of this.
Thanks for the feedback
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I do recommend reducing compression ratios as much as possible. Below 2.0ā¦ closer to 1:1. Depends on your particular hearing loss though.
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HI Dave, thanks for responding I must have missed something on the āwarbleā search suggested by Raudrive.
Your suggestion about controlling compression and feedback sounds encouraging. I am not sure how I would create a program to reduce digital manipulation on my hearing aid though.
Also, can you expand on the āLyricā and the concept of an analogue hearing aid?
Thanks
Cliff
Do you know if there is a control on the Widex app for this?
Modern hearing aids are built with one primary goal in mind: improving speech intelligibility.
This a whole can of worms, but analogue hearing aids could have some advantages: less processing latency and smoother sound production from continuous sound waves. Digital hearing aids break sound it to bits, which can add harshness. Analog hearing aids can also have a wider frequency response, capturing more of the harmonic richness in instruments. Iām sure some would debate that digital aids have evolved so much that these differences arenāt as relevant today. Iām not sure of that.
The Phonak Lyric is an example of a modern analogue hearing aid. The only one I really know of. Maybe other members know of some.
Anyway, there isnāt a lot you can do with the Widex app, but you can have a pure sound program. Have the audiologist minimize feedback control artifacts, lower compression, and turn off features like noise reduction wherever possible. Ive personally found that feedback management can introduce a lot of unwanted warbling. There can be unwanted tradeoffs if you turn off a lot of these features.
Theres also the X factor: sometimes the cochlea is no longer capable of perceiving a clean tone the way it used to. There can be inherent perceptual distortion.
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Thanks Dave
I will explore the Lyric option
Hi. yes there is a pure program on the Widex and you should be able to get to it through your app, though your audiologist may not have set it up for you. can you describe what the distortion sounds like in your guitar? does it sound like overload, or something else? I had a lot of use with Widex with music and they did work really well. In my case we turned off the feedback manager which also helped, Iām not sure wehther you could do that with your hearing loss but it is something to explore. Also put on Pure program, turn off sound expansion, all of these will help.
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So interestingly enough, this just came up from Widex, whole new HA platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oCfJhyNZwY&ab_channel=HearingTracker
The key here, is that pure sound is now much more adjsutable which might really help some people
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@xonic83 Itās interesting to see Widex come forward finally with new aids. And I appreciate that they are sticking with a more holistic approach to natural sound that they always have, rather than narrowly focusing on speech and the removal of noise. I say that as someone who uses the Infinio Sphere and Widex, very different philosophies. Im looking forward to a more adjustable pure sound program.
Are you using both Phonak and Widex right now?
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Not using any HAās right now, Iāve been struggling with what to buy. Iāve used both Widex and Phonak extensively in trials, prefer the widex sound overall, but RICs donāt work with my situation so now having some Phonak custom Titanium in canal models built, unvented so I get some of the low freqs back. weāll see what theyāre like. Yes an adjustable Pure program will be cool. I wonder why they even bother having the Universal program these days on the Allure? they definitely do still have that, but I@m wondering why they need it, what the Pure program canāt do or whether Pure is the new Universal so to speak.
So Iāve had the Widex SmartRic since May 2024. While the PureSound program sounds pretty good with my guitar, the Widex will tun on more feedback control while playing if the HA senses too much percussion, and that mutes the treble for a minute or two. So I mostly use the music program. To adjust the compression you really need the program the audi uses, Compass. And you donāt do it directly but by tweaking the gains, which can be very difficult. The most you can do is adjust the 3 band equalizer in the app which might not help much. And some of the distortion might be caused by you faulty/damaged ears and canāt be corrected by the HA. Iāve done some DIY and itās a bit like groping for walls in the darkā¦you might improve things and might also screw things up. Some have resorted to complex frequency analysis hardware and software to try to identify the frequencies causing you issues. You should post your audiogram so we have some idea of your losses. I think in my case my left distorts things a bit because I had some of this with my Philips too. I do know my left ear canal is shaped differently from the right and maybe molded inserts instead of domes might help me.
I do tend to use PureSound (added by your audi as an option in the app) most of the time even though my losses are more than the current PureSound program handles well. I only get away with this because I donāt have the prescribed gains turned up all the way since my audi set me up as āinexperienced userā after we found high gains were too uncomfortable. The new Widex should have a better PureSound mode but that auto switching feature makes it not ideal for instrument playing. Music mode at least stays put and does have most features off or very low to reduce distortion.
The other thing is that you should look around for a music audi specialist. I did find one in LA and she is not cheap. I donāt think any of my guitars sound perfectly ācleanā and thatās probably my faulty ears. The Widex does a pretty good just but looking forward to the new Widex Allure because feedback is supposed to be much lower and PureSound does have some issues with that at timesā¦depends on your losses and the gains set by the audi. Right now if you are beyond mild or moderate like me than PureSound can be problematic. Music on the other hand is pretty good but maybe a bit trebly which can be tweaked a bit in the app.
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Thank you for this response. Your experience is formative for me. I will speak with my audiologist.
Itās straightforward for a provider to turn OFF feedback control and adjust compression, as well as turn off wind and other unnecessary features on a single dedicated program that one uses for playing music. This is what Iāve done to solve warble and other issues. I use Signia Ax aids and that dedicated program is essentially the same as Widex pure, but possibly even more pure. Without that my classical guitar and alto recorder sound bad and/or distorted and warbly. Look up Chasin in the search function here. Somewhere thereās a pdf that you can print and take in with you to your provider. It tells how to set up a musician program.
The Widex music program has all but the highest frequency compression set to 1.3. I recently even adjusted those higher frequencies to 1.3 by tweaking the gains and didnāt find much difference but need to test further. And noise reductions and feedback are also off in the music program by default as are other speech related options. Widex is pretty good already for music and once you do most of this then it comes down to things like domes or your own physical ear issues at receiving these signals from your hearing aids. Unfortunately some hearing damage canāt be overcome with even the best hearing aids and I think I do have some of that in my left ear because I had the same sort of mild distortion issues with my Philips HA which I set up in a similar fashion. But I have to say the Widex SmartRIC HA have been much better and a noticeable improvement for me over my Philips 9030ās.
I wonder if what youāre experiencing here re trebble turning down is not so much the feedback, but the way the HA is handling loud sounds. When I spoke to widex tech support, they suggested turning up the MPO and then I believe we had to lower the gain. This gave the HAās more headroom. They did still react and clamped down the sound on occasions, but it was far less. I turned all the feedback managers off as I found them really unacceptable in terms of processing noise.
I did have to turn the high freqs down on pure sound as I found the overall shape of the audio really sharp.
I just looked at the MPO values and canāt increase them but they are 103-107 dB and I know Iām not even coming close to those. Probably 80-85 dB max Just cranked the amp up and did some percussive stuff and only hit about 84 dB MAX on a dB meter so not close to the MPO values. I turned the transition speed to slow to see what difference that might make.