Recently fitted with Starkey Xino 90’s. Moderate to severe loss - ski slope pattern - so these are working well and the RIC’s small size is fantastic!
BUT, this is my first experience with aids and some of the sounds are not normal. For example, if I crumble a newspaper it sounds like tin foil, and running water in the sink sounds very metallic. These sounds are sharp rather than soft. Most everything else seems OK.
Are tinny or metallic-like sounds normal for digital aids, or can this be adjusted? How? ( a brief try with adjusting high frequency volumes did not seem to work - but I am in the first few weeks of the fitting process so don’t be too critical of the Audi yet. ) Does my mind just get used to it and adjust? Voice and most other sounds seem normal.
Thanks for your input or experience.
The aids you have are not inherently tinny sounding. However, I’d say the software can have a tendency to set the aids a little too harsh sometimes. Your hearing professional should be able to adjust for that pretty easily.
Assuming you have a high frequency loss, you are likely to notice the change in sound at that range the most because you are do used to not hearing those sounds in such a while.
With a bit of work the hearing professional should be able to soften the sound, either with more compression, less gain in the HF, or even by experimenting with Spectral IQ (some people prefer it off, some like it on).
Find out what your algorithm is too. Some like e-STAT, some do better with NAL-R, just as an example. This can affect the ‘color’ of the sound, but again all a guess without knowing the loss you have.
How recent is recent? Most people react this way the first week and first couple of days especially. This forum gets at least one thread a month with this same reaction from a first-time user. If it’s been more than a couple of weeks, you may need an adjustment. This should be fixable, but don’t race back in the first week with this issue because as noted, your brain needs time to make sense of what it’s hearing for the first time in a long time. If the setting is adjusted too soon, you’ll just have to go back later when your brain gets used to that adjustment and everything seems too dull.
I have been wearing mine about 3 months now…At first it seemed a bit tinny, now I dont even notice that .