Oticon Opn: Adjustments to boost male deep voices

Hearing Aid Self-Fitting and Adjusting [DIY]
#21

Well,
I thought earlier I understood that if I need to hear men’s voice (bass) then I need to bring the vent’s size from 1.4 to 1 mm and indeed I did hear some men talk now … but the sound is dulled and dried like the hitting the plastic container… Do mean to to increase vent’s size will increase treble (high pitch voice)?

Aslo, do you know what is this little clock display next to 0.8mm. Is it mean that base on my audiogram, it recommended me to have 0.8mm?

Thank you

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I did check all Programs have same vent size. I just set it to 1.4mm(it was 1.4mm before and I brought it to 1mm) with the vents are still plugged up. I will test HA out tomorrow at work to see if it is making any improvement
Thank you all again

#22

I am only familiar with the Rexton software, but I suspect that symbol is the recommended vent size. Rexton recommended 1 mm which is essentially the same. Keep in mind there are three issues at play here. One is the target gain curve which comes from the prescription like NAL-NL2. The second is the vent size. Each vent size has a gain loss associated with it, and in the case of the open dome, a small gain in the midrange. These losses and gains are shown in the venting graph I posted earlier. The open dome has a 30 dB loss at 250 Hz, while the 1 mm vent has only a 5 dB loss. If you just switch an open dome to a totally closed or 1 mm vent, you gain 25 dB at 250 Hz. That is only if you don’t tell the fitting software about it. If you tell the fitting software what you have done, it will try to correct for the vent size change. If you change both the actual vent and tell the software about it, the only real way you gain is if the HA or receiver was unable to deliver all the gain needed for an open fitting, it might be able to with a closed fitting. As you can see from the curves changing a 1.4 to a .8 or totally closed is quite a small gain, but it might be enough to hear it, if the software does not wipe it out.

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One way or another, if your only issue is male voices but not female, I would focus on the very low frequency range of 80 to 160 Hz, and try and get some gain there.

#23

Thank you Sierra,
Let me test out your suggestion and will let you know how that goes

#24

I found this discussion thread very informative. I was also finding it challenging to understand male voices among other things.

The vent size of my custom ear molds is .08 and I requested my audioligist the change default to NAL-NL2 (with information here) and its made a world of difference for me.

I feel there is room to further adjust middle frequency compression (discussed in another thread in this forum) in my Oticon More 1 HAs for music. I’ll experiment that with my audiologist next. The audiology practice mainly deals with Phonak and are not very familiar with Oticon and Genie software.

Thank you all.

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