Hello, I am looking for a solution to better hear loud women’s voices (enthusiastic words, laughter). They are too loud in my ears and cause me pain, and are incomprehensible. Do you have any ideas to help me?
Cookie bite audiogram. I sympathize with you. For me it’s both my daughters’ enthusiasm and dismay that are physically hurtful.
I wonder whether girls’ voices aren’t painful to you or whether you aren’t around them often enough to notice?
My approach is to dial down the G85 band (loud sounds) up to a compression ratio of 2.5 to 3 even though it hurts understanding. The Comfort in Noise program is even further failed down. So basically I have a don’t hurt me program that I turn on if my girls get rowdy. Also I max out the sudden sound repression of Oticon.
It’s not a solution, but it’s a start. I would love to find a more specific approach. I tried looking at the sound response and asking my girl to be loud. But somehow it doesn’t reproduce well and I don’t see what frequencies are to blame.
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Maybe speech mapping with a woman speaking loudly?
(I know that may be difficult to access.)
IIRC, @Um_bongo does that often, I’m not sure does standardized ISTS 85dB signal measurement-based fitting may be enough in that case.
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Hi,
Same here , with my hearing aid ( CIC) I feel that my ears are hurting for my daughter’s high pitched voice. I will be with her all day in home and difficult to bare her voice.
What can I ask my Audiologist to reprogram for such hith pitched voices or sharp sounds from objects .
Gain Averaging.
This is where the prescribed gain is calculated as an average of several of the test values, rather than just the individual value at that frequency. In some cases it results in a ‘smoothing’ of the output, which sounds a bit more mellow.
However in the first example above it leads to over prescription around 4KHz. The nominal level of gain for 45dB of loss would be around 15dB (1/3 Gain Rule for Sensorineural Losses). If you look at the claimed gain above, it looks well over double that has been applied. However, this is also unverified, if the canal residual volume is lower than average, the effect on the output might be higher. This can only really be checked by real ear measurement.
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Yes, that’s too much output given the loss shown in the original Audiogram. Like I noted above, for any given audiogram level, divide by 3 and you’ll get a nominal gain figure for a sensoneural loss. Add in the input (50/70/90dB) and that will give you the output.
(I couldn’t re-post that).
Edit: but you need an actual REM result to prove what’s happening.
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I think you’ve saved my ears. Thank you.
Edit : Yesterday, I got that bad sound again. I realized that it was also in the voices, generally male and female, for certain vowels (A, O) It’s loud, and several words are distorted. I’ve tried lowering the MPO, midrange and bass, but an adjustment brings another problem. I wonder if it isn’t the sound of the equipment that isn’t right for my brain. I’ve been wearing hearing aids for 15 years. The ones I have at the moment are the Philips 9050s.
Looking at the audiogram of @Annikgill1234, I understand how gain averaging would lead to over prescription at 4k. However, Mine is nearly flat around 4kHz. Any effect of averaging would rather lead to under prescription, right?
Would you have any other suggestions for dealing with loud female voices? I just decreased the lowest gains in the range 2kHz-4kHz from 37 to 33 and the reduced the mid and loud gains so that C.R. is around 2.5 and it works too, but it still seems like a rather coarse approach, that will lead to less speech understanding.
That still sounds like the aids are a bit over powered given your loss. Unless you have a conductive loss, you should be looking at about 20dB of gain at 4KHz measured by REM. 37dB Just seems way too much: conversational speech at 65dB with 37dB of gain is over 100dB (near you UCL). And loud speech/music would likely be excruciating.