I have recently got my first pair of hearing aids. When I wear them my voice only seems extremely loud and booming and seems to echo like shouting in a tunnel. I am not sure as this is my first pair of hearing aids if this is normal. Is it? If not, is there a “fix” for it? It certainly is miserable and has given me a lot of headaches.
Thank you to anyone who takes time to reply.
It sounds like “occlusion,” which usually results from using domes or molds that don’t have enough venting for your low frequency loss. I’m guessing you have pretty good low frequency hearing. If so, the “solution” would a more open dome.
What kind of hearing aids do you have? The Rexton/Signia/KS8 aids have a feature called Own Voice Processing. They are trained to recognize your own voice and essentially cut the hearing aid gain when you are talking, but not when somebody else is talking. It does work pretty well. The other solution is time. It seems most get used to it after a while.
You can tell the difference between occlusion (like when you stick your fingers in your ears and speak and your voice is boomy) and ampclusion (when the hearing aid is amplifying your voice). If you turn the hearing aids off and your voice still sounds boomy, it is from occlusion. Opening up rhe vent or dome so that low frequency sound can leak out reduces occlusion. There are trade offs with clarity and microphone directionality with more open fittings, so it can be a matter of experimenting to see what you like.
The other major issue is feedback. If you have a high hearing loss in the 3 kHz range, your hearing aid will want to deliver lots of gain at that frequency. The problem is that if you have open fittings or even a medium to larger vent size, that frequency of sounds come out the vent and back to your hearing aid microphones to start the feedback loop. The other alternative to closing down the vent size is to reduce gain in the higher frequency speech range. That obviously has adverse effects on the the ability to understand speech.
I think, he has a closed mold. He needs a little (0,8mm2) vent on that or a single vented dome.
Yes, it is.
When I started to work in radio with microphone and headphones, my own voice sounded strange. I learned to accept it.
There is the added factor already mentioned: own voice is inside your head, the skull, and the ear hole. Un-aided, the sound is not trapped in the ear-hole. Plugged (dome or mold) own-voice is trapped in the ear hole and sounds extra loud.
Evidence: talk to a kid with high-end earbuds on his music player. They may try to listen to you without taking the buds out; but when they talk they take the buds out. It sounds strange. And they have no motivation to learn to accept it.
“Own voice quality” is on the short-list of HA adjustments. Often a very minor tweak at one frequency will make the user much happier. But it is very specific to how own-voice sound passes through and around your head, and your perception, so you absolutely have to tell your technician!
Older aids could sound like “talking through my nose” or “out there”. You mention “echo”. I suspect there is a delay in the HA processing. The delay is not apparent in most listening, but hearing your own voice is highly sensitive to small delay. Again some adjustment of gain helps the direct or the delay signal dominate. (And FWIW: in time you can learn to talk with very large delay between mouth and ear, as we sometimes did in the radio studio when monitoring own-voice on tape.)
Practice!
Tell the doc!
The Signia/Rexton Own Voice technology reduces the gain right across the whole spectrum of frequencies. The reason it can do that is that it recognizes when “you” are talking versus somebody else. That way they can be quite aggressive in controlling the own voice effect. This video explains what it is going. When the training is done with Connexx you can see on the screen where it is reducing gain.
Why you need to observe what is “wrong” with the sound of your own voice:
Commonly-Described Own-Voice Complaints
• “My voice echoes; sounds hollow.” (overall overamplification)
• “I feel plugged up when I speak.” (acoustic and non-acoustic occlusion)
• “My own voice sounds funny, like in a recording.” (overamplification)
• “Feels like pressure on my throat when I speak.” (non-acoustic occlusion)
• “My voice is too nasally…too bright.” (overamplification of highs)
• “I sound like I have a lisp.” (speech defects/artifacts arising from hearing impairment)
• “I feel like my head is down in a well.” (too many lows, acoustic occlusion)
• “I tend to shout in presence of noise” (Lombard effect— gain with too many lows)
• “I talk too softly when I wear these hearing aids” (acoustic occlusion)
My hearing aids are Starkey Livio’s.