You have a spike at one freq in one ear did the Costco tech double check that
Is your audiogram shown the one Costco made during your 2023 Nov test? Which of the five (5) audiogram’s did Costco use to program your hearing aids?
Did you get a copy of the REM verification to show accurate the programmed aids fit your loss? Any freg that the program is off more than +- 1dB should be tweaked.
Good exercise is to use the 5 audiograms to understand the mean and the min/max deviation at each freq
I assume you directed this set of questions to me as the OP o this thread. Correct? If so:
You have a spike at one freq in one ear did the Costco tech double check that
Answer: Yes, he comfirmed that the bone method showed the same spike.
Is your audiogram shown the one Costco made during your 2023 Nov test? Which of the five (5) audiogram’s did Costco use to program your hearing aids?
My Jabra Pro 20 HAs were just ORDERED at that Nove. 15 session. I pick them up Nov.28.
Did you get a copy of the REM verification to show accurate the programmed aids fit your loss? Any freg that the program is off more than ± 1dB should be tweaked.
My Jabra Pro 20 HAs were just ORDERED at that Nove. 15 session. I pick them up Nov.28.
Good exercise is to use the 5 audiograms to understand the mean and the min/max deviation at each freq.
I studied the 5 audiograms collected over the years. There were minor deviations in the results, but no actual surprises. The hearing loss is very typical with age and the shape of the curve has not changed meaningfully.
I realize the tibe congestion issue has caused both temporary/changing changes in both the specifics of the audiogram curve shape and the magnitude of the hearing losses, as that congestion severity and location (left vs right ear) varied over the years.
I realize too that the hearing loss is not untypically bad given my age.
But, I think that beyond the simply phsyical hearing loss, what has actually caused the greatest problem is the apparent deterioration in my brain’s ability to:
(a) correctly and/or cleanly interpret certain conversational sounds (words, word endings, consonants, etc)
and
(b) distinguish the voice I want to hear from a noisy background (e.g. when watching TV with my wife, or sitting at a noisy restaurant with my wife and son
I say this because even when I HEAR something being said in these circumstance, I cannot discern enough of it to know exactly what is being said.
So, the current crop of hearing aids, industry-wide basically, that address these issues as prominently advertised features, are likely to be very beenficial to me.
Jim G
This is a pretty classic perception with high frequency hearing loss. Speech spans the whole frequency range. Average conversation is about 45 dB HL. So when you are hearing it, all the sounds at 2 kHz and above are still missing. At high frequencies, that’s a lot of the consonants.
Additionally, the brain uses interaural level differences and interaural timing differences at low and high frequencies to understand where things are in space. Knowing where things are in space helps the brain to lift a particular sound stream out of background noise. Both of those cues are distupted with your asymmetric hearing and high frequency loss.
Certainly untreated damage to the ear results in upstream changes in the auditory system over time, and you’ve likely been living with hearing loss long enough that that is indeed the case. But all of this can also be expected just from that configuration of damage to the ear.
Hearing aid companies are notorious for over the top marketing claims. Hearing aids can definitely help but they are not as magical as the companies marketing claims make them seem to be.
MDB, I know you are correct, and I do share your skepticism about advertising “truth”. But to use an unrelated but persuasive example, while televisions today aren’t quite as good as their makers advertise them to be, they are indeed a LOT BETTER than what we viewed years ago! When I see video clips from old Super Bowl games and grom old TV shows, I am startled at how bad those old clips look compared to current ones. On our current television screen, I can see skin pores on the actors’ faces. On older TVs, the faces themselves were not very detailed, let alone the skin pores.
I am looking forward to hearing via current technology hearing aids, and the comparision there will likely be very dramatic versus my current unaided hearing, even if it misses achieving the perfection that hearing aid advertising touts!
Jim G
Thank you for this excellent post. It explains so many things about hearing loss and it’s affects. I personally have lived all of them not to mention all the social issues with hearing loss.
Your second paragraph is very interesting. It also is personal to me having bilateral CI’s now. Having learned localization/directionality is a big thing for me but still working the separation of conversations out of a crowd. It’s getting better though.
The OP will get these things back with hearing aids if he has lost them. His comments do say he has to some extent.
Just some warning if you haven’t read stuff on what to expect as a new hearing aid user. You will be hearing sounds you haven’t heard in a long time, Some will be mysterious until you figure out what’s making them. Some will seem inordinately loud (running water, flushing toilet, crinkling paper,dishes clanking, etc.) Give it time. Your brain can adjust if you give a chance. The solution is not to try to adjust hearing aid settings to get rid of them, but instead to let your brain adjust. Using volume control on aids is a good interim solution if it’s overwhelming.
Thanks, MDB. I have also seen similar comments from others on this forum, and I have been paying attention to these warnings. I recognize that most people, including me, are naturally resistant to change, because it threatens our sense of control. But being a retired engineer, and a pronounced observer of details, makes me want to overcome that resistance to change in an effort to better “optimize” daily life, by hearing more (like song birds), by being able to determine direction from which a sound is coming, and by being able to zero in better on the person’s voice I want to hear in a crowd.
I am also NOT resistant to hearing "differently’ than I have in the past. I don’t want to reproduce my past hearing. I want to use my hearing aids to IMPROVE what my auditory system can achieve. And I don’t care if my own voice sounds different to me with the HAs. I have never particuarly loved it. New might be better!
I liken what HAs can do to what eyeglasses did for me. When I first got eyeglasses in grade school (after an alert teacher noticed I appeared to have difficutly reading the blackboard), it was a total revelatino for me! I ad no idea the world could be so CLEAR. Likewise, when I got laser cataract surgery, I could not be;lieve how much BRIGHTER colors became - I had not noticed the “drabness” coming into my visiion over the years. The new eye lenses were a very welcome change.
So, I am looking forward to “change”, and will not fear it, but rather welcome it.
Jim G
Do you find localization better than it was when you were bimodal?
Localization is very regularly the thing that hearing aids cannot give back, or in some cases actually make worse because we have to block some natural low frequency hearing in order to restore hearing at more important areas. RICs lose the monaural pinna filtering cues, and there are some neat ways that manufacturers try to give these back, but pinna cues are above 5 kHz anyway and a lot of individuals with hearing loss don’t have aidable hearing there anyway, or if they do it is dramatically degraded. Interaural time differences are most important at lows and interaural level differences are more important at highs, although your brain will use both across the spectrum in artificial lab conditions. Manufacturers tend to just assume that time differences (from sound hitting one ear and then the other) will be preserved because processing times from one hearing aid to another are approximately equal. Level differences (from head shadow) are not preserved when the two hearing aids are doing all sorts of things to manipulate noise and swing directional microphones around (one of the cute things that the Roger On does when it is positioned correctly at a table is apply level differences based on speaker location). You can also imagine how even minor device dirt/damage might also throw these off. Sound location isn’t the only thing used for speech in noise scene analysis, but it’s not a small thing.
That said, given stable hearing and good audibility, with training localization is pretty flexible. In the lab we used to bias an individuals sound localization off to one side in only a few minutes with a bit of manipulation. So if there are stable cues available, even if they have been disrupted from what the brain expects, you’d expect them to be useable with training.
I was not bimodal. The second CI was done 3 months after the first. I took the hearing aid off to help the CI learn faster.
Before CI I did have localization with hearing aids. I found that taking the time to really balance the hearing aids made a huge difference in my hearing. I also used maximum frequency lowering with Phonak aids.
When the first CI was done one of the first things I really noticed was the loss of localization. I did wear a hearing aid on the other ear for about a week before taking it off and never putting it back on. When the second CI was done I still didn’t have localization. It came about 1.5 years later with lots of practice listening to and finding birds in the yard. With CI’s I could now hear birds and differentiate the sounds of each one very well. This helped with localization.
My apologies to the OP for getting off topic.
Interesting. Good practice game. Jack Katz proposed a clock game where you close your eyes and your parnter creeps around the room and snaps a snapple lid and you point to where you think it is and then open your eyes and correct. Bird localization sounds more engaging. I think it could be done quite well in videogame form, but you’d need to have binaural streaming in stereo, or headphones that went comfortable over the hearing aids.
It’s not TOTALLY off topic. It’s. . . relevant to helping the OP manage his expectations during his new journey. Useful wetworks discussion for an engineer. 