First you need to share your audiogram, preferably on your profile avatar so it’s always accessible and not buried in a obscure post nobody knows where to find. It’s important to know what kind of hearing loss you have, so see if your natural hearing can pick up low frequency noise or not. Secondly, please share what hearing aids you had before you switched to the OPN Play. This may matter because the open paradigm may be new to you if you used to wear a different brand aid model.
In order to debug effectively, you need to isolate the contributing factors instead of compounding it. Here, you’re combining things like doing things on your iPhone and jump into conclusion that it’s the hearing aids’ fault if you did something on your iPhone. You need to first maybe even unpair/forget your OPN Play from your iPhone so remove any effect due to the iPhone completely, to see if you still hear the white noise without having anything to do with the iPhone at all. By trying to turn on/off the background noise and its volume, and the white noise selection, etc. using your iPhone, you’re just muddying the water and it becomes almost impossible to pinpoint to where the real cause is because you’re combining things instead of isolating them.
Now let’s say that you still hear the white noise after the Play has been unpaired with your iPhone, then you will have just proven that this is an issue from the Play and not from the iPhone. Whether you can use an iPhone hack as a workaround to stop this noise is irrelevant in the context of trying to figure out where this noise comes from.
I know that you said the tinnitus feature is not turned ON, but has your HCP actually verified this on Genie 2 for sure, or you just think so? Assuming that it’s been verified to be OFF, the next thing to verify is whether your General program, which I presume to be what you use when you have this issue, has the Directionality Setting set to Open Automatic or Full Directional. Usually it should be set to Open Automatic.
But if it’s set to Full Directional, it will cause roll-off in the low frequency range, and the hearing aid will try to compensate for this roll-off by boosting the low frequency range amplification, thereby also boosting up the floor noise, which can be heard by people whose hearing loss is only in the highs and they still have good hearing in the low frequency range where the boosting happens. This is why it’s important to share your audiogram in your profile avatar so people can see what kind of audibility your have in the low frequency range. But if this is the case, you would hear it as well in a quiet place, which you say you don’t, so I’m not sure if this hypothesis applies to your issue or not.
If it’s set to Open Automatic and you still hear the noise, it may just be real background noise and not the white noise that you hear. The Oticon open paradigm allows almost all the environmental sounds to come through, so if you don’t hear anything in a quiet place, but start to hear things in semi noisy places, it may very well be just that, the environmental sounds that are being let in by the OPN Play. This is why it’s important to know what your previous hearing aids’ brand/model is. If it’s not Oticon, you may be used to the aggressive noise blocking by your previous hearing aids and now can hear more than you want to hear.
Now if you had unpaired your OPN Play from the iPhone and experience no more white noise issue at all, then it can probably concluded that your white noise issue comes from the phone when your Play aids are paired with it. That would be a debugging process to take up with Apple support next.
