Just hypothesizing, but I’m guessing presence of floor noise, wind noise or other noises is much less noticeable for people with low frequency losses. I think it’s mainly an issue for people with normal or near normal low frequency hearing.
I get the same on my NHS Resounds, helps what @berettadm1 said, because my low frequencies are good but high frequencies are bad. I have learned to ignore it now to be honest but I imagine for those with tinnitus it must be annoying.
Thanks for this good piece of information.
I do have neural automatic on and also outer ear to balanced (i dislike “focused”, for then the acoustic world seems to turn around when i follow a sound source (car) with my head) - i also tried “aware”, but there was no difference in floor noise.
You are right with the phonacs. I have set the limit for directional mode high, but also the lower end squelch a good deal lower than normal (i like to “hear a flea’s cough”). I heared a lot of (real) rustling, but no static noise.
oticon does the directional processing rather late in the processing chain. So they have the static of every single mic instead of the static of an analog switch. And white noise is nasty - it sums up the energy regardless of addition or subtraction or phase shift. it could be so easy! Just cool down my ears with liquid nitrogen. This could reduce the amp noise dramatically…
Do you remember the good old mics (slotted metal cubes) of the 50s? Two mics that could be added or reverse added with a mechanical switch to change the directionality…
Hm, that’s interesting that Neural Automatic is ON yet you still hear the floor noise. I only hear the floor noise when I have Full Directional ON. I don’t supposed you enable the MoreSound Booster in the ON app when you hear this floor noise? Because MoreSound Booster would set Full Directional to ON automatically even if your default setting is Neural Automatic.
If not, maybe you can follow @PaulC 's suggestion to turn the Feedback Manager to Low or OFF to see if that helps. Maybe that’s what you’re hearing instead.
If that doesn’t help either, I have one last suggestion for you to try → in the event that this noise is due to the amplification of your high frequency hearing loss for some reason, it might be worth trying to turn on Speech Rescue set to the lowest 2.4 configuration, then set the High Frequency Bands to OFF. What this will do is move your high frequency sounds into the lower destination band of between 1.6 to 2.4 KHz range (the left most 2.4 configuration) and turn off the amplification of the normal high frequency sounds that got lowered to low frequency (by turning High Frequency Bands to OFF). This remove a good chunk of amplification between 3 to 7 KHz, so that IF indeed that the white noise you hear is due to high frequency amplification for some reason, then removing this high frequency amplification would reduce that floor noise.
But because you have moderate to severe hearing loss in the high frequencies, I’m not sure if you’d be able to hear the floor noise in that range to begin with. So this Speech Rescue suggestion is just a last resort thing to try, but it’s still worth trying. Technically you shouldn’t need to use Speech Rescue because your high frequency hearing loss is only moderate to severe, so the normal amplification with the right size receiver should be adequate without engaging in frequency lowering.
I assume that the floor noise is at the same frequency as the sound that the hearing aid is trying to amplify, by the way. So high frequency amplification would result in high frequency floor noise that would not be heard due to your moderate to severe hearing loss there.
Below is a chart of the Speech Rescue Source and Destination bands just for reference.
My white noise is there, whatever i switch on or off (except of course ).
And it’s steady, clear and clean, so it’s not the feedback manager (it would only “tap at the microphone” while there is danger of ringing).
And - technically speaking - it’s really amp noise; no crackle, no popcorn-noise, not digital noise as a crosstalk from the converter or the wireless. I hear the electrons reverse tunnelling like in the early days of opamps.
No, no, no ! This is casting out the devil with beelzebub .
First thing I did, when i got iPFG, was to turn off downmix of my phonaks. Any shift in the high frequencies is a scourge to someone who has a feeling for sound and audio systems.
Unfortunately, trying settings is tedious for me.
I’m still trying out (borrowed) devices. So until now i didn’ make an effort to get Genie2 to do the optimizing myself a i did with phonaks iPFG. My audi is very patient and helpful, but i alwas have to arrange a remotecare-session (and explain quite awkward what i want to change, as he is a good audiologist, but not very skilled with software).
As soon as i have the check from my health insurance (and a pair of devices without defects) i immediately will try to get genie2 myself. Then i can evaluate all those features my audi knows how to use them, but doesn’t know by heart where the corresponding button is.
So the best will be to ignore the little noise and be happy with what is possible. It doesn’t bother me - it just was my job to never be satisfied with any electronic and software and always find a way to optimize it further.
Nevertheless many thanks for your suggestions!
I’m not suggesting that you use Speech Rescue for good. I’m only suggesting that you use it as a temporary debugging tool to see whether the noise you hear is the floor noise due to the amplification of the high frequency range or not.
It’s unlikely that testing this out will remove the noise you hear because I still suspect that this is the noise due to low frequency amplification, but as a last resort, in the unlikely event that this is due to the high frequency amplification, this is a quick and only temporary way to test it out.
Let’s say that indeed for some reason via this test the noise goes away for you, then I’m not suggesting that you should stick to using Speech Rescue to solve your problem. This test is only to reveal where the problem is. Once you can confirm that the problem is in the high frequency amplification, then you can turn off Speech Rescue and go into fine tuning and perhaps start trying to dampen some of the high frequency gain in various spots to see if the noise may go away or not.
Of course another obvious thing to try is to simply ask the audi to let you try another pair of More, in case there’s some defect with the current pair for some reason, although if it’s a defect, it’s unlikely that it would happen to both aids at the same time.
And trying things out on your own with Genie 2 would be the best approach for debugging instead of bugging your audi too much like you said. But isn’t that a chicken and egg problem because you probably don’t want to buy the More if you can’t solve this problem, and if you buy the More so you can DIY to try to solve this problem and you can’t anyway, then you’d be stuck with the More?
I didn’t know that there’s a way to control the mic directly via Genie at all. The only indirect mic control I know of is via the Directionality Settings in the MoreSound Intelligence menu.
What does the mic noise limiter do, by the way? Suppress the floor noise from the mic somehow? If there’s such a control in Genie, can you share with us? Maybe it’s in Genie 2 somewhere but I miss it. Thanks.
The decision for more1 is already made. All i wanted to know was, wheter this is a defect, a known flaw or normal.
What may look strange to you is a is a typical German problem. In Germany everyone must (by law) have a health insurance. This is a good thing, for you get good medical treament regardless what happens to you. On the other hand this means, that i pay a fortune every month to the insurance company and since each treatment has to be taken over, they look for loopholes to get out of the responsibility. For example (with some companies), if you have a prescription for physical therapy and don’t start it within two weeks, it will expire.
A cost estimate has already been sent to the health insurance and now it may be some struggle to get the more1 instead of more2 or more3. If they find out, that i “abuse” the borrowed hearing aids they might as well get less generous.
Since i tried more3, more2 and more1 and they all had the noise more or less, it can’t be a normal defect, but perhaps there are “better” and “less” items.
Since i was patient for a decade with my phonacs, why not be patient for some additional weeks and then proceed.
Thank you @Lostdeaf ! I didn’t see this option because I never had this option checked in my Preferences setting like you did. It’s great to learn something new today from your sharing!
@BernhardG → you should definitely check with your audi to make sure that this Silencer is not disabled (turned off) by accident for some reason.
I think Oticon wants it ON by default almost always (meaning that they always want to automatically reduce the microphone noise), so that’s why they even go through the trouble of hiding it so that it can’t be messed with (and why I never knew about it before), unless you really want to turn it off for a particular reason. Then you would have to check the Preferences to display that option in Automatics before you can turn it off.
If you don’t see that option, check the Silencer box in the Preferences to display that option to make sure that it’s ON. It should be ON by default per the Oticon verbage, but it doesn’t hurt to check and make sure.
OK, thanks for the clarification. Since you now revealed that you tried all 3 versions of the More and hear the noise in all 3, obviously it’s not a mfg defect then.
We have a lot of Oticon users on this forum and many of them also have good low frequency hearing, and as far as I can tell, you’re the first forum member who raises this white noise issue. So if it’s not a mfg defect (as established) and nobody else (with good low frequency hearing) ran into the same issue before, I sure hope it’s some kind of programming software/setup issue. The DIY route to continue to debug this is a very appropriate approach. Don’t forget that you’ll also need to buy the NoahLink Wireless interface in addition to getting the Genie 2 software.
I sure hope it’s the Silencer feature being turned off for some reason, because I’m out of idea by now.
I think I have this same issue with a Real 1. My audiologist claims I will get used to it. From what I’ve learned Oticon needs more expansion settings to enable this to be better adjusted. A skilled audiologist could probably still dial it out, but average possibly not. Perhaps we should email support@oticon.com or the international equivalent and nudge Oticon to work on this issue.
In my experience with my Oticon More 2 hearing aids, the white noise feature is optional and something that my audiologist turned on for me specifically to help treat tinnitus. She was able to change settings in the Oticon app in my phone for me and make adjustments from her computer dashboard that optimized the white noise and sound level for treating my tinnitus. The name of the setting in the app on my phone is “Sound Therapy.” An audiologist might be able to turn that feature off permanentLy, but if not, l I like that I can easily use the tiny buttons on the hearing aids themselves to turn the white noise sound therapy completely off when it’s not helpful or gets tiring and also can use the buttons to adjust volume up and down to my liking as well. Hope this helps.
After a looong telephone call to my audi, we enabled the silencer-checkbox and controlled the automatic-options-page. Silencer is on. Virtual ear is aware. Directionality is neural. Tinnitus-Mask is off.
… and the (low) noise is unchanged, although i’m geting so used to it, that - except immediately after putting my HAs in in the morning - i only get aware of it, when i’m listening.
So if everything else fails, i go to the extreme: “i try to think”: :
oticon claims, that they split the input of each microphone (and the auxiliary input) to seperate 64 frequency channels. Since this is done by a signal processing chip, I think they use some sort of polyphase quadrature filter (this is the same procedure as the first step of mp3-coding).
I don’t want to torment you all with the mathematics of digital filters, but in principle they work by delaying the signal step by step and summing up scaled portions of each delayed step.
So if the addends are scaled, there will be an error in the lower bits, small but ubiquitous. A polyphase quadrature filter stacks and combines the output of several filters, what again adds some of this “quantization noise”.
So if in the end - after processing all those clever comfort features - if they sum up the channels again, they will sum up not ony the analog noise of the microphones (until now we only considered this) but also the mathematical noise of 3x64=192 channels. And since noise is a nasty fellow ('think i mentioned it , especially if you quantizise phase) it sums up merciless. This may quite possibly add several db of noise.
Of course this can be reduced by upscaling, but since there have to be a plethora of adders and multipliers, this increases the technical effort enormously (there are signal processors that work with float numbers, but they are expensive in terms of transistors per chip and energy demand from the batteries. And they would trade in quantizision noise for non-representability errors).
This is interesting, since real uses an even more advanced chip - but since it is almost a miracle to create a 64-filter bank that is delay- and phaseneutral enough to not sound like a drainpipe after re-summing, i guess, they did not touch it.
I’m afraid, as long as they do not employ Harry Potter as an engineer , we will have to work with existing physics.
So in the end:
Use the “mental signal processing” to just not percive the noise. Our head is still more powerful than any computational device!
Thanks for this detailed update, @BernhardG . What you explained sounds sensible in theory. However, in practice, I wonder why so few people (like yourself and @user490) have shared this problem on the forum. I know I do have a mild to moderate loss in the low frequencies, so it’s very possible that I can’t hear what you hear because you have almost normal low frequency hearing. But there are plenty of Oticon users on this forum with normal low frequency hearing as well, but I haven’t really heard from almost anyone complaining about this issue until now.
Also, you mentioned that your 12-year-old Phonak doesn’t have this problem. I’m pretty sure Phonak also use multi-channel signal processing as well, like almost everybody else in the HA industry. So I wonder why this issue is not observable on your Phonak aids.
I wonder when you were testing things out with your audi, whether it occurred to you to ask your audio to disable the Silencer to see whether you notice if there were any noticeable added white noise that you could hear even more than with the Silencer OFF?
Think i have to…
I’ll post again, when i have my own more’s and the Noah-Wireless.
Currently i’m working on correspondence to get the more1 - my healtcare will only pay for a maximum of about 4400$ (4000€).
Don’t know, how many channels there were inside the AUDEO III (low budget!), but for fine-tuning only six (6) bands were available - with a range of +/-32. So let them have 8 or 16 channels - they had a broader transmission curve, so they needed a lot less coefficients. Compare the noise of 192 complex filters to 32 simple ones - the cost/benefit is shattering - although it was useful to put out the phonaks for concentrated work and plugging them in again when leaving my office - while i put in and forget the oticons.