I’ve had my Philips 9030 hearing aids over a year now. I did purchase the Noah bluetooth connection and have made several small changes on my own since last seeing my fitter at Costco. I am still at the 80% level and have also reduced the high frequency twice (5 db) total and the mid frequency once (2.5 db) and updated the firmware twice. I also recently turned the speech enhancement to max, this in an effort to improve my speech understanding…didn’t do much. I appreciate the muffled hearing I had without HA being lifted, hardly notice I’m wearing them anymore and hear better. But I really don’t understand that much better. I have issues with fast talking weather persons, always women. We have one guy here in San Diego that doesn’t recite the weather likes he reading it and I understand him perfectly. The others seem to want to cram as much useless information into their time while not really providing more information than the clear steady talking male weather man my wife and I both enjoy (Shawn Styles). The other weather people and news casters as well could learn a lot from him.
But I realized that much of the problem resides in my brain too. I waited too long to get HA and so some of what I hear is difficult for my brain to process and derive meaning. It all seems too fast at times, annoying other times (especially commercials) and just impossible to comprehend. Yes I HEAR much better for instance birds outside I never knew where there, lol. I don’t know if my brain will get better at this and I’ll stop saying “huh” or “what” to my soft spoken wife. Turning up the volume on my HA just makes my voice much more annoying as well as everything becomes too loud. I’m reminded that I’m wearing “aids” and this has not and will not restore my normal hearing.
Other observations are I still having annoying wind noise when mtn biking that I mostly am able to ignore, certain notes on my guitars don’t sound correct and lots of “warbble” and/or distortion with some of those frequencies. If my HA are employing some sort of AI, the effect is not apparent in any way to me. Noisy environments are improved with the noise program at the expense of the improved hearing and so some of that “muffle” I experience without my HA comes back. It’s a compromise and in general it sort of works but not that great really. I saw there was an app that works with my phone to better process speech in noise and if I wasn’t retired and in noisy environments all the time I would look into that more.
Oh and streaming music sounds better to me now than it did in the beginning. I’m using a graphic equalizer in addition to adjusting 3 bands in the app and it’s not too bad, not great, but not terrible either. Rechargeable battery life is pretty good and only runs low after about 18 hrs. I hope that my brain will get better over time at understanding. I’m sure some of my progress has been due to my brain hearing function improving but not sure how to accelerate that at this point. But I know I’ll continue to wear my HA all day long because they do make most things better.