My wife has had new Signia Insio AX5 for three weeks. Never had HAs before. She has a pretty steep and deep slope on her test result.
She is so far happy with the insio AX5 as far as understanding people in relatively quiet environment. She has two more months to try them, so hopefully we will be able to go somewhere noisy soon.
However, she can’t use the HAs to listen to music. Both non-streamed music from good quality speakers, and streamed music from her smartphone sounds horrible she says, almost unrecognisable if she did not know what was being played.
Is there something special about using HAs for music? Does it need some special ‘program’? So far she only has one program - Universal - activated.
It could be that the aids are adjusted correctly or it could be that her hearing loss is the reason she doesn’t enjoy music. She needs to talk to the audiologist to see if there are other adjustments that can be made.
Hearing aids can take a number of fitting adjustments to get them the best they can be for a person.
Yeeesh. I can relate a bit here! I have to say that my Phonak Marvels may have different options, but one is to have what I call a “dumb ears” program set up to remove any correction the aids may be doing for dynamic range. With hearing aids, the sound is compressed, so you get more MUSH and less crystal clear separation of the highs and lows, louds and softs. Well, p’haps I don’t explain that very scientifically, but maybe your wife’s audi can play around with some program options and reserve ONE for listening to music without auto-correction enabled.
I was a musician, had to give it up with my hearing loss. Wearing my hearing aids, most music sounds off key, it is horrible. Very sad about this. Work with the audi to see if any adjustments help. Didn’t help for me, though.
There are programs for both live music and recorded music that your audiologist can add with the AX platform. However, I would imagine that would only help marginally if she thinks it’s as bad as it sounds by default, but can’t hurt to try adding them.
There are a couple threads with more musically inclined folks that have tinkered with certain gains or compression (a little over my head) to improve how music sounds to them; I’d suggest running a search (here’s one, for instance: Signia Pure for Pianist? ), and maybe you can bring that information to her audiologist to try to help with adjustments. I also came across a video a bit ago with adjustments for Signia in particular, unsure how helpful it is:
Music involves a much wider range of sound compared to what hearing aids are normally set up for. This is why many hearing aids can be set up to have a seperate music program that you can manually switch to. It establishes a much wider range. Think of the keys on a piano. A normal hearing ignores the far end of the keyboard where a music program allows the entire keyboard to be heard. If course this is a simplified explanation. Your audiologist needs to set up a music program on your aids.
Thank you very much to all for your contributions.
We have appointment with the audiologist in a couple of hours, and that will be the major complaint.
The Signia AX is supposed to have 3 programs for listening to non-streamed music, so we will ask for them to be enabled or set up.
The audiologist said she wanted to go step by step, so maybe that is the reason we only have the Universal program so far.
I will report later.
It isn’t a perfect solution, but listening to music through excellent headphones like Sennheisers can help! I have to keep my aids IN as even with earbuds, I’d hear pretty much squat without the BEANS to boost volume. See what’s out there! There are a lot of music buffs & musicians here who could give you suggestions if you pose a new topic!
Oh. OOPS! In my rush to post, I overlooked there ARE answers here, LOL.
I’ve tried to listen to music through headphones and it’s resulted in total silence. But something to keep in mind. If you listen with headphones and you’re hearing impaired you may want to crank them up to compensate. Thus risking further damage to your already impaired hearing
At the visit to the Audiologist this morning, she loaded a “Recorded Music” program intended for listening to music at home. I think it is intended for listening to speakers, not for streaming.
There are other two programs available that deal with music - Live Music, and a program that she said was for musicians. We did not want any of those.
When we got home, my wife tried the program while listening to Spotify on our smart TV connected to a pair of good speakers via a AVR.
The result was the same as with the Universal program - the music sounded very bad.
Unfortunately, my wife can’t explain what is wrong with the music. It is just bad.
Both of us have been using headphones for watching TV for several years. We started with the RF systems, but lately we have been using a twin BT transmitter and two pairs of BT headphones. Good quality Sennheiser and Audio Technica.
On her laptop, and on my desktop, we have been using wired Sennheisers - again good quality. I am happy, my wife not very happy with the outcome. I use APO equaliser. She would not have the skills and patience to configure an equaliser for herself.
Having the new HAs, my wife expected that she will get better quality of music from the laptop, but it is not the case.
Disappointing thing is that even direct streaming of music via BT from her smartphone to the HAs is poor quality. Yet the Signia AX marketing material is full of praise of the new platform for direct streaming.
So to wrap it up - it seems my wife is not the only one with poor music experience with HAs in general.
And the latest Signia AX platform is certainly not working for her in this regard.
but I doubt that any of them have Signia Insio AX.
This is the point - we were hoping that the HA will mitigate the hearing loss with both - speech and music.
The audiologist is only selecting switches on the Connexx software. She does not know much about the Signia AX, as it is a new product. I don’t think she would be keen or able to develop a new program from scratch.
My wife can say that she is not convinced with the Signia AX, and ask to try Phonak. But we want to try the Signia in a restaurant and other situations before making decision.
I wish I had a better answer. Maybe it’s the aids. I have phonak paradise and am very happy with how they sound with music. But everyone is different. Please remember that hearing aids are a compromise at best. They’re not going fix anything. And trying to understand speech in a restaurant especially a noisy restaurant is a real challenge for most aids. But I applaud your effort to test the aids in different situations. We can all recommend different aids, which I did, but it all comes down to the individual user and how he or she feels after trying each aid. Just remember that no aid will return her hearing to what she remembers as normal.
Hearing aids are not made for music listening. Her clinician should be able to adjust the music program to be less compressed and to have greater low frequency emphasis and less high frequency emphasis, they can turn off any frequency lowering and feedback management that would negatively impact the music. She may, depending on her hearing loss, benefit from a slightly higher power receiver in a custom tip. That being said, hearing aids simply do not have the capacity to reproduce low frequencies the way a quality headset can, and depending on the hearing loss the ear canal will not be sufficiently occluded to keep the low frequencies IN. What the hearing aids CAN do is return some of the clarity and “brightness” to music, but this may also be limited by the degree of damage in the ear.
So, what to expect. If your wife is someone who loves listening to recorded music, she needs to listen over a set of quality speakers or a nice headset (as she probably did before). If she’s listening over speakers she can wear the hearing aids and the clinician should be able to create a program for her that will sound good (likewise, live music). If she is listening with a headset, she may or may not be able to also wear her hearing aids to brighten up the highs–it depends on whether they fit comfortably under the headset without feedback. If she wants to be able to, for example, go out for a walk and listen to streamed music and she can’t find a headset that works with her hearing aids, she may want to look at something like the Audeara, or a similar headset that will amplify a bit for the higher frequencies.
There’s a perception that hearing aids are just a one stop shop for resolving all listening situations, but it’s just not the case. I don’t know what set up your wife’s expectations, but switching to a different hearing aid likely will not resolve her music quality issues. Sorry. She needs to judge the hearing aids on how well they improve her ability to communicate, and manage music listening differently.
Minor quibble for audiophiles: I don’t think music streamed over LE bluetooth sounds as good as music streamed over classic bluetooth. If she can say, “okay, I know that streamed music over hearing aids isn’t ever going to be as good as a quality headset, but I like the convenience and I’m okay with ‘pretty good’ for day to day music listening while commuting”, she may find a bit of improvement connecting the hearing aids to her phone via the streamline accessory rather than directly.
Trial the Widex Moment. I’m in the Oticon More1 now as hearing speech has overruled everything else. But I wore the Evoke for three years and they were clearly superior for music both live and streamed. And for live music I always used closed double domes. She may find speech performance acceptable with the Widex along with a significant improvement in music.
Yours is not the first comment about Phonak and music. I read somewhere else that Phonak Paradise has the best music experience straight out of the box.
I have also read many posts by musicians how they go about improving their HAs. There is a group of researchers in GB dealing with this subject. They publish recommendations for HA users and fitters how to improve the ‘music’ programs.
What is upsetting is that none of this seems to be getting attention of the HA manufacturers.
People have to ask their audiologists to make some obvious changes to the music programs, such as disabling feedback, compression etc. This should not be necessary, or at least it should be possible to do this in the smart phone app.
At our next visit to the audiologist I am going to show her some of the recommendations for music program, and ask her to do it.
Maybe it will improve the experience.
