#161

To a huge degree, the ability to segregate speech streams in a noisy environment relies upon one’s ability to localize them within the space. Blast damage appears to impact structures beyond the cochlea and into the auditory system more significantly than a chronic lower level noise exposure. Your speech clarity on that side is low and binaural timing and level differences are muddled. One can localize sound monaurally with spectral cues, but the weak spectral cues occur up above 2 kHz and strong ones up above 4 kHz and you’re losing ground there in the good ear. I suppose all that is just to validate your experience that your hearing loss is different than someone with a similar level of more traditional presbycusis.

Modern premium hearing aids claim to be able to provide an SNR boost of 6-9 dB, but keep in mind that this is in very specific controlled laboratory environments. A real-world value might be more like 3-5 dB. It is not uncommon for people with hearing loss to require a signal to noise ratio above 8dB, and it is not uncommon for a noisy restaurant to have negative SNRs. So at that point, yeah, it doesn’t matter how fancy your hearing aids are. Clipping a mic to your conversation partner’s collar is always going to give you the best SNR, which works for one-on-one but not so well for groups. The roger on will give you a better boost in a group but still won’t solve the worst noise environments, but at least you have control of who it is close to. Look for environmental solutions as well–do you have any control over when and where you are meeting people? Often locations for social gatherings can be a bit arbitrary and groups might be open to suggestions of a smaller restaurant or a less busy time. Can the family member with the more traditional carpetted dining room host more often than the one with the open concept hardwood great room? Sometimes this sort of thing can be really low-hanging fruit compared to eking out another quarter dB SNR with hearing aids.

6 Likes
#162

@Mark_Chambers: What kind of civilian range would permit firing an 8,000+ foot pound round?

But, I think it’s incorrect to class the muzzle blast of even the mighty 460 Weatherby with the kind of overpressure blast waves that artillerymen and IED victims have been exposed to. It’s the overpressure waves that cause the deep structure damage to which the audiologists are referring, I believe. [NOTA: I have little to no expertise in the physics of small caliber muzzle brakes, admittedly, so my conclusion may be erroneous regarding the damage that the infrasonic component of the blast can cause.]

I could be wrong - one of the Providers will correct me if I am (I hope).

#163

@SpudGunner

“I have little to no expertise in the physics of small caliber muzzle brakes, admittedly, so my conclusion may be erroneous regarding the damage that the infrasonic component of the blast can cause.”

A brake is a vented device that installs on the end of the barrel and takes the blast pressure that normally vents out the front and redirects it outward and rearward, more or less perpendicular to the barrel. Unfortunately that includes the report. Many private clubs will not allow braked rifles under covered benches. This was many years ago at an unregulated public facility. Here is a short quote from a Field and Stream article.

"• They Will Deafen You (If You’re Not Careful)

The biggest problem is noise. A muzzle brake will deafen you if you are not very careful. With the muzzle blast coming toward you instead of traveling away from you, the report goes from unpleasant and ear-damaging to unbearable and ear-killing. You can’t shoot a muzzle-braked rifle without earmuffs, period, even when you’re hunting."

Shooters are normally extremely considerate and polite. Unfortunately it only takes one asshole one time to cause damage.

1 Like
#164

Yes, I know what a muzzle brake is, Mark.

2 Likes
#165

Couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that it was physically painful. It hurt like hell into the next day and the ringing was there for at least two.

When questioned by the audiologist when I was tested and fitted for my first set it was the only thing I could think of that would result in the difference between the right and left. Hearing issues run in my family. My father and every one of his 7 siblings was hard of hearing. They were also bull headed and refused to wear aids.

#166

I hope you don’t think I’m implying that the muzzle blast didn’t deafen your left ear. It would be enough. In fact, I’m surprised that it didn’t do big time damage to your right ear as well.

#167

No such thought entered my mind. As far as the blast it was directly to the left with nothing between us but some space and I felt the pressure and the heat. But the noise was deafening. Literally I guess, HA! Who knows for sure. But It’s the only thing I can think of that was unique to the left side.

2 Likes
#168

Sorry to bring this old topic back. I have a question about the More’s Speech in Noise program.

DSL is a no brainer for my music program. I am very happy with it and my acoustic and classical guitars sound great. However, I have been going back and forth between VAC+ and DSL as my main program (slot #1). Problem is that the Speech in Noise program also changes every time I change between VAC+ and DSL.

Let’s say I am comfortable and happy with either a VAC+ or DSL main program. Which fitting formula gives me the best Speech in Noise program? Since VAC+ is Oticon proprietary, would it yield a better Speech in Noise program compared to DSL? How much “automation” goes on in those “stock” programs Genie offers us? Can I get the same level of this “automation” using DSL? Genie 2 doesn’t allow us to have a Speech in Noise program based on VAC+ and a Speech in Noise program based on DSL at the same time, right? That makes it hard to do an A/B test. Would @Neville, @Um_bongo or any forum member have any thoughts on this?

#169

You can have both, you just have to hack it. The More “Speech in Noise” program is just whatever is in P1 with the noise reduction features cranked up. You can copy your DSL (or VAC, whichever is not in P1) program and just crank up the noise reduction features to the same settings that the “speech in noise” program uses.

That said, the VAC+ has a floating linear window that is not maintained in DSL which may or may not make a difference to you (though, if you don’t notice much difference between a VAC+ and DSL main program, then probably not). Additionally, DSL has separate noise targets that were introduced a few years ago. I know that they are available on the audioscan real-ear machines, but I’m not sure about others. Your clinician may or may not be aware of them. They are not available in the software, but they are just gain changes so you can start with a DSL base and verify to noise targets. You can equally start with a VAC base and verify to DSL adult noise targets if available, and maintain that floating linear speech window. Offhand, the DSL noise targets are probably somewhat in between the VAC+ targets and the DSL calm targets.

#170

Thank you, @Neville. Lots to unpack here, gonna do my homework and learn a bit more about what you’ve said :slight_smile:. Two things I noticed. First, the “Speech in Noise” program is louder than P1. Second, P1 recommends sound enhancer to “Balanced”, while Speech in Noise “Detail”. That puzzles me, I thought this would be the other way around.

#171

@e1405 → I tried looking at the gain curve for my type of hearing loss for the More 1 on Genie 2, toggling between the P1 default and the P2 Speech in Noise program that’s a built-in program from Oticon, so I can compare the 2 gain curves visually on-the-fly to discern their difference more easily. And indeed the gain curve of the Speech in Noise program is slightly elevated between 500 Hz to 2 KHz for my hearing loss. What this is implying is that the Oticon built-in Speech in Noise program is not just exactly the same P1 gain curve but with the noise reduction parameters and such adjusted to make it Speech in Noise, but Oticon also seem to have made some slight adjustment on the gain curve as well. So while you can set all the parameters in the MoreSound Intelligence menu (like the noise reduction and the other stuff) in P1 to match exactly like what they are set in the Speech in Noise program, the fact that the 2 gain curves are slightly different implies that you won’t get the exact same result, but probably close enough.

But @Neville is right that if you want to have an equivalent of Speech in Noise based on DSL instead of the default Speech in Noise program which is based on VAC+, just copy all of the parameter values in MoreSound Intelligence, and whatever you have set in Automatics and Speech Rescue (if any) that appears on the Oticon Speech in Noise program over to your DSL program, and you should have the equivalent of Speech in Noise for DSL.

The screenshot below is the help section for the Sound Enhancer in the MoreSound Intelligence menu. If you read this, it seems to make sense that in the Speech in Noise program, you’d want the Detail setting for the Sound Enhancer so that you can discern speech over other sounds more easily. But in P1 which is for most other environments, you don’t need that kind of level of details that you may need in Difficult, so the Balanced value probably is a good compromise between Comfort (which would lose the level of details but make things sound more smooth and comfortable) and Detail (which would make things clearer but maybe at the expense of louder, sharper, and more tiresome sounds to listen to).

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#172

Sorry, when I looked I didn’t see that. But it may be hearing loss specific and just not apparent with the curve I had in there.

#173

Thanks, @Volusiano. Now it makes sense to me. It seems that the Speech in Noise program boosts the important frequencies for speech while tuning down everything else.

From what @Neville explained about VAC+ and DSL, and the discussion you are part of in the REM vs In-Situ thread, proprietary rationales optimize sound processing in ways the manufacturer deems appropriate. It has been said on this forum that the goal of the optimization is to streamline first fit. However, I wonder if the analogy I once used (iOS/iPhone vs Android/countless different hardware) applies to HA and proprietary formulae as well. I mean, there is a lot more going on other than what we see and are able to control in Genie 2. Oticon calls this “automatics”. Hence my question: since the Speech in Noise is a built-in program, would it work best with Oticon’s VAC+ template? If I have VAC+ on P1, would I have the same “automatics” going on in a DSL program with the exact same parameters of a “cloned” Speech in Noise program? If I have DSL on P1, would the Speech in Noise program be constrained anyhow because that is not Oticon’s formula? Those are questions I could answer empirically, I suppose. Perhaps this is even a fool’s errand (maybe not, since I do hear 1dB sound increase)… Just asking them out of curiosity at this point…

#174

I’d have to double check whether this is still a thing Oticon is implementing with the More, but historically my understanding is that the answer would be yes with DSL but no with NL2. This is only because of that floating linear speech window that Oticon likes is coming into conflict with the slightly more prescriptive standards that have to be met by the manufacturers in order for them to include DSL among their options. Because that linear window did not meet the compression rules in DSL, they had to turn it off. Note that this floating window is a nice idea with no independent evidence for benefit and which did not seem to make a slam dunk difference for Oticon. I’d have to double check whether it is still active in the More processing or whether they dropped it with the AI. If they dropped it, then it shouldn’t make a difference–I can no longer see it listed in the features, but it was there in the Opn.

Note that the independent standards only define the provision of gain. They do not make rules about attack/release times or automatic features, so typically (lately) those are all active and the same across different rationales except in specific instances of which Oticon is (was) one (for DSL specifically, not NL2).

1 Like
#175

Thanks, again! I really appreciate all your knowledge and willingness to share and help. So I infer that the Speech in Noise program based on VAC+ could (in theory) have a bit more juice compared to DSL. I am going to test that empirically and report back my impressions. For what it is worth, here are my programs… P2 and P3 have the same setup in “MoreSound Intelligence” and “Automatics”.
P1 (VAC+):

P1 - 25-01-23
P1 - 25-01-231672×817 110 KB

P2: Speech in Noise (VAC+ based):

Speech in Noise (VAC) - 25-01-23
Speech in Noise (VAC) - 25-01-231659×806 108 KB

P3: DSL clone of Speech in Noise:

Speech in Noise (DSL) - 25-01-23
Speech in Noise (DSL) - 25-01-231659×815 108 KB

#176

Looks like you had a clinician’s answer for this question from @Neville . I’ll just give you an answer from a user’s perspective when looking at Genie 2 and you can draw your own conclusion from that.

I think if you choose a non-VAC+ rationale in one of the 4 programs, you can simply go through the Genie 2 settings for that program and see for yourself which parameters are allowed and which one aren’t in order to discover whether Oticon imposed any limitation on what can be set for that rationale or not. I’ve browsed around and as far as I can see (but I haven’t exhaustively or methodically checked of every possible combination), almost all Genie 2 parameters that can be set on VAC+ seem to be allowable on the standard rationales.

But there’s one exception I found, but it’s not really about VAC+ vs. the standard rationales. It’s more about the default program P1 vs the other 3 programs P2, P3, and P4.

The first difference is that you can only select VAC+ or one of the other 4 standard rationales in P1. You are not given a choice to choose a built-in program (like Speech in Noise) to put in P1. You can put any built-in programs in P2, P3 or P4, but not in P1. I don’t know why Oticon does this, and what is so special about P1 vs the other 3 programs. So if you want to mimic Speech in Noise for P1, you would have to copy all the values in the parameters set in Speech in Noise and apply those same values in P1. Then your P1 becomes the (almost) equivalent of Speech in Noise, minus the difference in the gain curve between P1 VAC+ and Speech in Noise VAC+ that we talked about earlier. If you choose DSL in P1, and apply the Speech in Noise parameter values to P1, then you’d effectively have a DSL-based Speech in Noise setting in P1 (instead of a VAC+ based Speech in Noise setting in P1).

Since you mentioned the Automatics, I played around with the Automatics settings in Genie 2 and I discovered something very interesting. According to the screenshot below for P1 in the Automatics page, there are 4 parameters that can be set there. But if you switch to either P2, P3 or P3 on this same page, the Binaural Broadband setting disappears completely, although the other 3 remains. It doesn’t matter if you have VAC+ or a standard rationale selected, or a built-in program like Speech in Noise selected in P2 or P3 or P4, you are simply not given the option to turn ON or OFF Binaural Broadband because it’s not available at all in P2, P3 or P4. It’s only available in P1.

I have no idea why Oticon reserves control of this feature in P1 only. I also have no idea whether that means that Binaural Broadband is OFF by default if it’s not available for control in P2, P3 and P4. I hope it’s the reverse, that’s it’s set to ON by default and Oticon just doesn’t want to give the user the ability to turn it off in P2, 3 and 4. It makes no sense to disable it for P2, 3, and 4.

Specifically for the built-in My Music program, Spatial Management control is also missing beside Broadband Binaural. But this may be makes sense because you want the music program to have minimal control, even minimal compression as far as that.

For Tcoil and Phone Tcoil, none of the Automatics options are available, which makes sense.

For the other variations of Tcoil & Mic or Phone & Mic, then 2 of the 4 Automatics options are available (TNM and Feedback).

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#177

Thanks, @Volusiano. Indeed, there isn’t much to do in Genie 2 in this regard. Hopefully I will be able to empirically assess any differences with the programs I have just set up. The three programs I have now look very similar and might sound nearly the same in quiet places. I wonder how they would help me in challenging situations. At this point I am happy with my P1 (either DSL or VAC+ with the same prescription gains) and Music program. However, like most of us, I still struggle to understand people in very noisy places.

This is also a neat little experiment. Gonna try that out when I am done with the one I am just starting.

I gave up on the MyMusic program. I got considerably better results with DSL using another experiment you guys helped me come up with.

#178

Have you searched this forum about the My Music program? Some of the folks here (@flashb1024) didn’t like the My Music program in its original form, so they worked with their HCPs to make adjustments to it (mainly minimize the compression and maybe some other gains adjustments), and they like the end results much better afterward. Maybe you can read up on those threads and also try your own adjustment to those effects. Then if they’re still not as good or better than what you have with DSL, then you can still always stick to DSL for music.

1 Like
#179

@e1405: Same here , FWIW.

#180

Glad to know, @SpudGunner. I recall you were/are a professional musician, right? Properly tweaked the MyMusic program might work for sound systems or streaming. It never worked for my guitars in the comfort of my couch.