How to solve hearing in a big room with high ceilings? (No echo but voices get lost.)

I’m involved in some long term research for 2 years and I’m at the second session today and the room is so bad for me as it has super high ceilings in a very old building which is huge.

I don’t get echo issues (I think!) as there is no bouncing of voices but I just can’t hear as I think there is too much space in the room for voices to disappear.

There’s around 30 of us in total but no background noise at all.

My Oticon Xceed 1 UP, my Phonak Sky V70 UP and Phonak Sky M70 SP do awful in this type of room.

Is there a way to help this issue? I’m stuck. Anyone else has this issue?

This research is super interesting so want to continue.

Should add, I turned hearing aids all the way up and it made such a tiny difference despite the volume being max.

Thanks.

That would work out very very expensive with 30 people in the room.

How about switching on iPhone Live listen to assist or NALscribe to assist.

Live Listen won’t pick up 2 big tables.

To hear with Live Listen, I’ve found it needs to be very near someone’s mouth for me to hear anything, even with volume turned up.

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Not sure this is workable. Used a wireless speaker that pick up the sound from a BT mic. Place the mic at the speaker when he talks. UP & SP HA’s will be useless if there is no rebound of the sound from the walls. The sound just move up to the roof.

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The problem here, outside of a poor acoustic environment, is mic directionality. Speech gets lost in these spaces because of sound decay, competing noise, and any noise reduction features you have active. You likely would need to add a program, change mic directionality to the narrowest option available, and increase g50, and 65 by 2 or so db. This will provide excellent clarity, but only when you are facing, or directly looking t the speaker which is great for listening at a distance, in a conference room, etc.

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Thank you so much! @user1016

This is a follow up question…you said that this is a 2 yr project. Have you found a solution?

No solution but the weird thing is, I can hear fine in these situations with my Oticon Xceed but with Phonak Naida P30 & P70, I have to raise the volume all the way up and still struggle.

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Thank you! I will talk with my audiologist about this.