@cvkemp: Chuck, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Separating speech from noise requires good binaural faculties, if I’m not mistaken, as well as spatial discrimination. Perhaps something with a very narrow “field of audition” would give better results.
[Hopefully, one if the Registered Providers will check in …]
Yes, most directional efficacy relies on binaural hearing. Moreso, the ears need to be aided or naturally within 3dB of each other at any given frequency.
The first observable benefit is the stereo addition in sensitivity. Worth 3dB.
The second effect is that without this balance, the combined directional fields break down or become skewed to one side.
You also lose temporal effects at certain frequencies.
(All three above are related, but are distinct problems of asymmetry.)
This is a bit of a ‘given’ in the hearing industry; there’s a paper from the early 1970s by someone called (Peter) Madaffari (sp?) who had this concept nailed on as the basis for the push to binaural hearing aid wear.
@Um_bongo: Many thanks for your reply … and the link.
Doesn’t this mean that Mark’s “demand” for good separation of voice from sound in More1s SIN program is , in practice, infeasible for him?
Voice is part of the Soundfield; Oticon says they kill off the interference noise at different angles and frequency bands while leaving the rest of the ‘picture’ intact. Also using AI they are trying to preserve the integrity of the vocal signal in increasingly complex situations.
How any one individual adapts to the signal is down to the individual’s mental plasticity AND previous experience. If you’ve ‘Learned’ your hearing from a particular delivery of sound; it can be quite a process to unlearn it.
This is my principal objection to proprietary techniques involving frequency compression/translation/transportation.
You can see from my audiogram that my hearing loss is asymmetrical too, a fact that makes me an “interesting case” for Whisper. Whisper was a “wow” for me right away.
@Um_bongo: Stephen, what are the proprietary things that Oticon does that you consider to be, for want of a better term, “unhelpful” for the broader population of patients with a hearing deficiency? (Working on the assumption that a greater good is served when patients have an easier time migrating from one make to another as technology and their individual deficits change.)
It is the fact that we are all individuals, that make it important that there be as many different possibilities as possible in makes and models of hearing aids.
But there is the thinking now in government and schools that everyone should be nothing more than clones. School try to make our children learn at the same pace which isn’t possible, they try to make a one size fits all in about every industry, and corporations keep merging to take away our options and choices. This isn’t to our advantage it is to our disadvantage.
My objection was based on the techniques used for frequency shifting etc.
I’m not sure that Oticon leads you up a particularly narrow garden path WRT their acoustic processing strategy; however I can see why someone who has habituated to a particular ‘ecosystem’ can find the step to another equivalent system ‘taxing’.
I drive a couple of different vehicles including a Mercedes Auto and a Citroen Relay manual van. The differences between them isn’t that huge (in terms of driver input) but the peculiarities of each system are obvious at different times. Having to actively re-learn those differences every 3-4 days requires a little concentration: I can only imagine the level of re-learning required to reprogram your entire Hearing gamut after many years of wearing a particular manufacturer’s best guess of what you’d like to hear.
Neville I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that information. It explains why I remain frustrated in finding an adequate solution for SIN, especially when others seem to have gotten there.
That audio gram led my audiologist to insist that I have an MRI to verify the absence of acoustic neuroma before she would fit me, especially after hearing that my sister had one. Hers was quite large and it was removed with gamma knife. Unfortunately it cost her about 70% of her hearing on that side. I was clear. My damage, as I noted above was from a blast on my left side. And I suppose you can tell by the speech recognition score that it involves more than volume. There is a significant amount of distortion involved. It’s tolerable at normal conversational levels but as the volume increases so does the distortion. Descriptively, it makes folks sound garbled, as if they were talking from a mouth half filled with water. With the Widex, to achieve some help in complex environments, I would put it Impact Mode, raise the volume a couple of clicks on the right but then had to reduce it that amount or more on the left or the distortion would kick in and become distracting. I got away with that for a couple of years but it doesn’t work anymore. Now I just pick up words here and there. Sometimes I can put things together but more and more lately I’m just watching lips move. The More 1, in spite of many of the stellar reviews I’ve read is no significant improvement, being only marginally better. Complex environments are just a hopelessly chaotic mess. I’m really hoping that the new Roger device provides some significant help.
Any further suggestions?
Um_Bongo how about you? By the way you were right about the Widex. Great sound but the feedback manager sucks. I finally had to go with a closed dome on the left side. I got used to the occlusion.
Thanks in advance
“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”
― H.L. Mencken
Oh I definitely agree with you
Serious question: have you tried many RIC aids with mismatched receivers?
More 1 with 60/85?
Resound Ones (the M&RIE) might work by simulating the Pinna effect, even on the worst ear……(again feedback risk)
Starkey Evolv?
I’m also trying to figure out which aids will work better for speech in noise, particularly the ability to distinguish between several simultaneous louder voices. Similar to Mark, I have pretty drastic differences in my hearing losses between my right and left, with the left sudden loss occurring just earlier this year.
I have tried both the More as well as the Paradise so far, and personally have found the Mores to be far better in helping me distinguish between multiple noises. If you’re in a scenario that is noisy but there’s really only one speaker in that noise, perhaps the Paradise would work better, as the background noise attenuation is fairly noticeable compared with the More, but in a setting like a restaurant where there is likely to be nearby voices that are loud, I found the More to be more helpful in understanding the person that I actually wanted to understand. The Paradise just created a wall of noise (voices) that blended and was inseparable. I did not try any Rogers accessories with it, perhaps that would help.
I am currently demoing the Pure Signia AXs, and haven’t quite subjected them to a highly complex noise environment as I have with the other aids yet (I intend to), but as far as their performance in noise is concerned, to me, they sit somewhere between the More and Paradise. With the More, I felt that the soundscape was more “natural” to me (there’s a whole thread with a bit of debate as to what that means to each individual), but the overall environment sounded closer to what my hearing was like prior to my drastic change in my left ear earlier this year; there is less attenuation of background noise, yet speech is relatively defined or focused through that noise. Though there were still times I felt like the overall sound environment was a little more heightened than what would naturally occur, thus sometimes distracting (though it could be attributed to the fact that I have in fact have had hearing loss my whole life without aids until now).
The Paradise creates more of a separation, thus making it sound more unnatural to me, but if someone’s sole focus is to be able to hear actual speech better, than I think it certainly accomplishes that. My issues with these aids, as mentioned, is when there are several loud voices all in the vicinity. While background noise doesn’t get in the way, it’s distinguishing between those voices that becomes nearly impossible for me. There were several instances in which I actually heard better after taking out my HAs. Seems quite counterintuitive. I suppose it just really shows how difficult it was for HA tech to truly mimic the auditory process of the ear and brain.
I’ve only had the Signias for just over a week, but they do seem to be middle ground between the More and Paradise, probably because of their dual-processing approach between voice and noise. Voices do seem to be heightened and brought to the foreground, yet background noise is still distinguishable and audible. The sound seems layered, so still not quite as “natural” to me, but not unpleasant either. Because I have the Paradise for trials and was given the AX as a demo, I currently have both of them, and have been able to do a couple A/B comparisons. The layered effect vs. the strong beamforming/attenuation effect is definitely noticeable in certain situations (at a busy dog park, for instance), but in other situations, the difference between the two are less prevalent. I set up my laptop and played a random noisy YouTube clip, and tried to watch a recorded show on my tablet and tested which aid might help me hear the show the best. I’d say the AX slightly edged out the Paradise, but to be honest, without the immediate A/B comparison, there wouldn’t be much of a way to definitively tell the difference.
Given that our personal experiences and preferences will differ, I would recommend trying the AX too! I’ve seen very little actual user reviews of the Evolv so far, would love to find some.
I have not. I was hoping the Roger streaming directly to the aid would work.
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.
@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).
“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.
Yes, I know what a muzzle brake is, Mark.
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.
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.