Hey Blane! Here are some tips that might be help you out. Please note that I’m not a hearing care professional, just a very enthusiastic self-learner and long term audio engineering hobbyist. Talk with your audi about these.
There are a couple of programs that might help you out: Noisy Environment and Stroll. Noisy Environment is the one to use if the people you are talking with are in front of you. Your audi can set the directionality of the microphones to narrow or wider. Wider is better if there are a group of people in front of you that you need to hear. This program also decreases background noise from elsewhere.
Stroll works better if there are people around you. It will use the SpeechFocus microphone mode which will automatically focus on the speaker no matter where (s)he is. Your audi can increase noise reduction for this program (it’s quite low by default), but it works best only for sounds that are not speech.
To sum up, Noisy Environment is best for situations where there are lots of people, but you want to only hear the ones in front of you. Stroll works best if you want to hear everyone around you. Your audi can set the noise reduction level for these programs independently.
The Stroll program could work here well with increased noise reduction.
For both of these situations there are other options as well. Noise reduction could be increased on the universal program and utilize Spatial Configurator to set the direction in which you want to hear. Another option is to keep the current universal program as it is and set a new universal program to program slot 2 for example. In this new program noise reduction could be set much higher and you could use Spatial Configurator with it as well.
Fortunately, there is a much better option than lowering volume. The right answer is to use compression (not frequency compression which is something very different). Did your audi input your UCL (uncomfortable loudness level) data in the audiogram when doing the first fit? If (s)he didn’t, the compression levels and knee points are probably set too mild and should be fixed.
If you are not familiar about compression, here’s the idea: when a sound at a particular frequency reaches a certain loudness value (this value is called “knee”), the dB’s that go past it are compressed (lowered) down according to a set ratio. All the loudness levels at the knee or below are left unmodified.
For example, if we set the knee to 80 dB, the compressor kicks in when that level is reached. Now, if the knee is set to 80 dB, ratio to 5:1 and a sound with the loudness of 90 dB comes in, the compressor will lower it to 82 dB. Where does this 82 come from? 90 dB - 80 dB = 10 dB and then 10dB / 5 = 2 dB, 80 dB + 2 dB = 82 dB.
Another example: let’s use the same knee, but increase the ratio to 8:1. Now a loudness of 100 dB comes in and the compressor turns it to 80 db + (100 dB - 80 dB) / 8 = 82.5 dB. As you can see, with more compression, we keep even very loud sounds at a reasonable level.
If the ratio is very high, let’s say 30:1 or more, we are essentially talking about a limiter. It basically keeps the loudness at the level of the knee at max, no matter how loud sounds come in. But just limiting everything is not wise as it starts to sound very unnatural quickly. Only the highest peaks should/could be limited.
So in your case, extra compression is needed to cut down some extra dB’s from loud noises without affecting lower volumes. Your audi can do it (hopefully knows HOW to do it) by hand, but if UCL data is available but was not entered in the fitting software, it should be entered and then recalculate the first fit. That in itself might do the trick.
