I must be doing something wrong with settings

Hearing Aids
1

Oticon OPN for over a year. Not too long ago went in and had the new firmware installed so they would work with the ConnectClip.

At that time I said I’d like LOUD noises brought down and SOFT noises brought up a lot. I can’t hear soft voices. Particularly female voices. SO, they got Oticon on the phone and first they changed the hearing aids from “1” to “3” - which I think is something like 70 - 85 - 100… Then they changed some setting(s) to increase the volume of soft noises and in theory reduce the amplification of loud noises… The Oticon person on the phone had them bump things a LOT for the soft noises.
And since I have tinnitus they turned on the white noise for that.

They did a hearing test and found that my response to various frequencies hadn’t changed. Which seems good, so they just made changes to the frequency responses of the two aids…

Went back a couple weeks ago because after that the default setting the hearing aids use at startup was SO loud I had to turn them down at least 3 clicks before even sticking the things in my ears. So they turned down something…

As always, I figured I’d give the changes a couple weeks to see if they were better or not, and if I’d get used to the new settings.

In a class (quiet room) Tuesday with 4 women, I could hear one of them. My wife, who was 5 feet away was audible but not understandable - this has been a long-time problem that I’ve always attributed to her very soft, mumbly voice. But, I also couldn’t hear the other people other than as a very quiet, almost inaudible noise and see their lips move.

I just went to a movie (Avengers) and at BEST I got 10% of the dialogue. And this was with the hearing aids turned ALL THE WAY UP. So, at the default loudness I can hear ambient noise, the cooling fan in the computer, tapping a pen on a desk sounds like gunfire, and my voice sounds raspy, scratchy, loud and distorted. But I can’t hear soft conversation around me worth a darn…

At a meeting Tuesday, in a normal room with a couple dozen people - mostly women, I could hear that there was something being said - a barely audible mumble, but there was NO hope of discerning any of the conversation. The whole group may as well have been doing mime…

And speaking quietly or whispering into my ear is utterly pointless even from a foot away.

And, at this point, my right ear is far louder than my left… When listening to an audio source with the speakers clearly left and right I have to change the balance so the left speaker is 2-3 times louder than the right for them to sound balanced…

So, long story that finally leads to a question… WHAT do I need to do or say to figure out how to get these things adjusted so quiet sounds - specifically voices - are audible without having to the turn hearing aids up so loud that ambient noise in a room is deafening, and LOUD noises like explosions during a movie aren’t DRASTICALLY loud?

And yes, I replace those little wax catching things all the time AND the cones that go in the ear…

Ideas?

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I share your frustration. In meetings with poor acoustics I used to crank up the music program to try and solve the issue.
I told my HIS the trouble I was having. He put in a surround sound program for me.
It’s pretty amazing as I can here conversations a floor above me now and in the same house and it’s t.v.

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You need a new provider.

4 Likes
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Those adjustments you asked for should be simple to make. I don’t know why your hearing professional couldn’t get it done right for you. Not even sure why they needed to get Oticon on the phone for help for something that simple.

It would be helpful to see your audiogram posted, by the way.

For the Oticon OPN, there are basically 2 places to adjust for soft sounds in the Genie 2 software. The first place is the Fine Tuning → Sound Controls → Soft Sound Perception → set to max Detail value to the right most setting. See the first pic below.

The other place is Fine Tuning → Gain Controls. See the second pic below. There are 3 rows for Loud, Moderate, and Soft. Just select the Soft row and bump it up a few dBs (maybe 3 or 6 dB or whatever value that works for you). That shouldn’t change the values in the Loud or Medium rows.

Similarly, if you’d like loud noises brought down, select the Loud row and bring down the gain by 3 or 6 dBs or whatever works for you.

By the way, increasing the volume of soft noises doesn’t in automatically reduce the amplification of loud noises like you said in your earlier post.

Whispering is always a challenge, even if you already bump up the soft sound volume.

As for the imbalance in the volume between the left and right ear, that can also be adjusted in the fine tuning section, by either increasing the overall left volume or decreasing the overall right volume or a combination of both. An overall increase would imply that you make the adjustment for all 3 rows (Loud, Moderate and Soft).

For really loud noises like explosions in a movie, have them go to the Fitting → More Tools → Automatics section and turn up the Transient Noise Management feature to High. See the third pic below.

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Thanks for the replies… I don’t have an audiogram… They’ve done three so far but I’ve never gotten a print or file.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the “SOUND CONTROLS” int the first screen you show. I HAVE seen the ones at the bottom of the second screen, and that’s where all the changes have been being made…

In THEORY, they’ve already bumped the settings for “soft” sounds up (that happened during the extended conversation with a person at Oticon) and moved the settings for “loud” sounds down… I hope I didn’t make it sound like when they made the soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer the loud sounds got louder… Loud sounds don’t SEEM louder and I’m not sure WHAT’S happening with soft sounds other than I seem to be having more difficulty hearing them.

Basically, they work worse now than prior to ever installing the new firmware, changing them from Gain “1” to Gain “3” (that’s, I believe, the 70,85, 100 thing I referenced in the original entry), getting Oticon involved, or any of the other things we’ve done in the last couple months.

My wife commented this afternoon that I"ve gotten a LOT worse since the most recent series of adjustments - more frequently complaining that I can’t hear her…

BTW: NONE of the meetings I’ve been at have been in “audio challenging” environments. I’d expect to have problems in a loud sports bar. These have been in “normal” rooms of normal size. I was at another meeting this evening, and the person running the meeting was using a microphone. He was fine. But ANY comments or questions from people in the audience of about 25 people were indecipherable.

Called the provider at 2:15 this afternoon to try to get in there BEFORE the meeting tonight. Nobody answered the phone so I had to leave a message for them to call me back. This isn’t unusual - it happens more frequently than I actually reach anyone. I never got a call back.

Unfortunately, small town. Only 1 provider here. Nearest other one is about 30 miles…

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Take a picture…

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skyemac11, I don’t know what a “music program” is… Do the OPN hearing aids have some sort of music program? And how would it improve the hearing? Same question about the “surround sound program”? Can someone explain what all this is? Oh, and what’s an “HIS”?

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Hearing Instrument Specialist

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The OPN does have a built in music program but it’s not necessary to install it for the sake of hearing speech better. Because of the “open” paradigm by the OPN, the default program 1 should be good for 95% of your various listening environment already, be it simple or complex listening environments. I use the default program virtually 99% of the times, even when listening to music myself.

The reason the music program may be helpful for other traditional hearing aids is that they usually employ directional noise reduction to aim at speech in front and block out all other sounds behind and on the sides. The music program does away with this directional noise reduction and opens up the sound field to a 360 degree field so that you can hear everything around you. Well, with the OPN, it’s designed to let you hear everything around you already, so there’s no need to have a music program to open up the sound field like with other more traditional hearing aids.

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Not, just this, also lowered gain, minimal feedback management and minimal processing too.

Even your Oticon can sound artificial in music if they are stressed enough.

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That’s weird that you asked your provider to bump up the soft sound and for some reason you now have MORE difficulty hearing them compared to when they bumped up the soft sound for you? Especially if none of the meetings you were in were in challenging/noisy environment.

Sounds like something drastically went wrong? Maybe it’s worthwhile to ask them to reestablish the baseline and make adjustments from the baseline again?

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I in fact do have a the Music program in one of my 4 OPN programs. But the feedback management seems to be applied to the music program just the same. Surely you can turn off fhe feedback management for the music program manually if you want. But it doesn’t automatically preclude the feedback management by default.

It does minimize the processing, however. Like removing any kind of noise reduction. And it puts the directionality setting to Pinna Omni.

BUT, in the context of the advice in this thread to try to use the music program for better hearing of soft voices or even better speech understanding in meeting rooms, that advice is totally unnecessary for the OPN.

Not sure what you mean by when the OPNs are “stressed enough”. I’ve been to a live concert and tried both the OPN default program and the OPN Music Program. Maybe that’s the most “stressed” condition you can put your OPN through in listening to music. While I could tell a slight different between the OPN default program and its music program (the music program sounded even more open, as if the OPN isn’t already “open” enough), I found the default program still giving me very natural sounding music as well in this live music concert environment.(it wasn’t classical or anything, it was an Abba tribute band).

I could have been happy with either the default program or the music program for this concert. But I actually chose to revert back to the default program after listening to this concert in the Music program for a while. Simply because I didn’t want to forget to go back to the default program once the concert was over and I find myself in a very noisy after-the-concert environment again, without having any noise reduction to help me out with speech if I forgot to revert back to default.

1 Like
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Very well explained.

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Got in to the HIS this morning… Turns out neither of us was aware than when you turn on the tinnitus control it turns OFF the volume control… Using the hearing aids to change “volume” just turns the white noise up and down… On a call with an audiologist at Oticon this was explained.

Which explains at least PART of why I was having so much odd behavior… Something like this: After the last set of adjustments, gain was at 3 and the hearing aids had a range of frequencies that were increased a small/moderate amount. AND, the tinnitus tool was turned on and set just below MY hearing threshold at the volume I “normally” used, which was 3 clicks DOWN from the default volume. At that volume, the tinnitus white noise was audible to my wife 3 - 4 feet away.

SO, I go to a movie, the dialogue is a little soft, so I start increasing the volume, THINKING I’m increasing the volume of the dialogue where I’m apparently actually just increasing the white noise. Which makes me think I’m hearing all the ambient noise in the room OR noise from the hearing aids. I wind up with the volume all the way up, lots of noise, the dialogue is still inaudible and I think I’m going nuts!

I have tinnitus, so the tinnitus thing may have helped a bit with that, but we took it off program 1 and set everything back to the settings we had last November, when things worked well… Got rid of all the stuff from February when we changed to Gain “3” (the Oticon person said they don’t change settings for soft or loud sounds unless the gain is “3”) and made some really large changes to a bunch of frequencies to bring of soft sounds and activate the tinnitus reduction.

So Program 1 is back to PRE-firmware update and large bunch of changes.

We also did some crude testing of different sounds. With my wife sitting next to me, she said the word “snake”. I heard “nake”. “Task” was “ask”. She sat there doing a hiss “ssssssssssssssss” and I could see her but heard nothing. I never realized I WASN’T hearing some consonants that are apparently can be at frequencies 4K and up.

Based on all that, the HIS increased the frequencies above 2K - around 4-5K, and suddenly “snake” was “snake” and “task” was “task”. So, we took the increased high frequency settings and put them in program 2. I can now switch between having things sound “normal” (or at least more normal) and having more high frequency boost to better handle higher frequency letters and voices…

We have ticked to a play this week so I’ll get to see if things work better with the new settings and no tinnitus control. One thing is DRASTICALLY different - previously if I put a hand within 3-4 inches of my ear, the hearing aid would feed back. I knew that should be from SOMETHING the hearing aid was generating, but never thought about the white noise. Turn off tinnitus, hearing aids no longer frequently squeal at me!

I"ll have to go back to the Avengers movie to see if the dialogue is audible, and if hearing it helps make the movie make sense, 'cause it sure didn’t yesterday!

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I still don’t see an audiogram from you so I don’t know whether Speech Rescue would help you or not. But it sounds like it should if you have hearing loss in the high frequencies and milder loss in the lower range. Do you have it enabled by your provider?

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I feel very sad about this right now.

Oticon VAC tends to be underfit generally, let alone at adaptation level 1.

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Didn’t have my cell phone so no picture.

What is “Speech Rescue” and how do I tell if it’s on or off? Since we keep talking to Oticon audiologists on the phone I’m going to presume it’s on, but I"ll ask.

Can you explain the sentence “Oticon VAC tends to be underfit generally, let alone at adaptation level 1.”, 'cause I have NO idea what you’re telling me. What is “underfit”? And what is “adaptation level 1”? And what’s a “VAC”? And what do I do to make sure NONE of this is a problem and they’re all, whatever they are, are optimized?

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Speech Rescue is a frequency lowering technology by Oticon. It is available since firmware 4 already. It takes the sounds in the high frequency bands and transpose then to lower frequency bands where you can hear better (assumably if you have high frequency hearing loss). It’s supposed to help you hear the high frequency components of the speech better. Like the s in snake or the t in task. We call those sounds fricatives.

We need to see what kind of hearing loss you have via your audiogram to see if frequency lowering can be effective for your kind of loss or not. Usually it’s not on by default and your provider has to turn it on for you in Genie 2.

So increasing the high frequency gains is one way to help you hear the fricatives better. But sometimes if your high frequency hearing loss is so severe that there’s not enough amplification to make this approach effective. That’s when frequency lowering can be of great help. Or you have both as well. You can have Speech Rescue lower the high frequency sounds to lower frequency bands, AND opt to leave the amplified high frequency sounds alone, so you can hear both, if you find being able to hear both helpful.

VAC+ is the Oticon proprietary fitting rationale (it stands for voice aligned compression). It basically determines how to best amplify sounds based on various hearing loss curves, usually with the focus on improving speech. Underfitting with VAC+ means that amplification may not always be used fully to the max and optimum potential in certain cases of hearing loss profiles on purpose for various reasons, usually to help improve speech understanding. Usually it’s best to use the manufacturer’s proprietary fitting rationale because they design it with their own hearing aids and their specific hearing strategy in mind. But they usually also include industry standard fitting rationales as well in case users prefer the industry standard fitting rationale over the proprietary one.

Adaptation level one refers to the acclimatization to get new hearing aids wearers to get used to the hearing aids gradually, by incrementally increasing the volume from a lower volume at adaptation level 1 to the higher volume at adaptation level 2, and finally to the full volume at adaptation level 3. The adaptation periods between the levels can be programmed by the hearing professional for you.

Ask your provider if they have that set for you. There’s a good chance that you don’t get enough amplification simply because you’re still at adaptation level 1 when you’re already ready to move on to 2 or even 3. For experienced users, they don’t need this and can go straight to the final adaption level right away.

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Weighing in with my own Oticon OPN experience here, GracieAllen…

I SO FEEL for ya! I had a very similar experience with the miniRITE aids I used for 9 months. I only held on to them cuz I’d been a long-time Oticon user and I was waiting and waiting and waiting for the much-anticipated release of their ConnectClip so I could stream with my NEW aids just as I’d always done with my Oticon Alta Pros, that were 4 years older.

I went in countless and numerous times for adjustments. I’d already been fit with an 85 receiver, which my aud-guy said was the largest that would fit in my ear canals anyway. While I loved the feather-light feel of the OPN, I was a rare case of someone whose ear/brain connection simply could not make sense out of the speech using these aids.

I had MANY MANY frustrating experiences in doctors’ offices, medical labs, restaurants, shopping (malls, Costco, et al) where I would SEE folks’ iips move, but could not understand what-all they were even saying. It seemed that all the extraneous, ambient noise was MAGNIFIED at the expense of simple, ordinary speech.

In utter frustration, I asked my aud-guy where I should go from here? (or there, as the case may be)

I was lucky to be fit with the Phonak Audeo B-Direct aids - still flawed, but about 100% better for my weird ear/brain processing, I guess! They only stream hands-free to ONE ear, but with a TV streaming unit, I can hear laptop, TV, etc., in stereo. I am HAPPY HAPPY with the sound quality!

I have mod-severe loss as my audiogram shows, and find that these aids with a double power dome do the trick, whether in a room, noisy place, car, or just streaming. Again, not 100% perfect, but I’m satisfied for now. I’ve had these since last fall.

Perhaps think about trialing a totally different brand of hearing aid? What have you got to lose! Let us know what works for you.

1 Like
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This sounds like the “OpenSound Navigator” was set way too low. Oticon seems to default to setting it low. When you were consulting with your audi did this subject come up? Can you remember?