I’ve just been equipped with a set of Oticon Opn 1’s through an audiologist. I can definitely hear more, but it feels like I’m hearing a lot of things I don’t need to hear and the sounds seem somewhat unnatural. I’d like to know if it’s possible for me to do any of the programming myself. If so, how?
It’s possible to do programming yourself (See DIY section of this forum), but what your describing sounds pretty typical for anybody with a new hearing aid. Your brain needs some time to adjust. Also, most aids give user some control over volume and treble/bass–unsure of specifics with Oticon. I’m sure others can help you out there.
Ok, I found the references to the FittingLink 3.0. For the price, it seems like it should be included.
Some of the sounds may seem unnatural for you simply because you haven’t been able to hear them before but now you can. It just takes getting used to them.
As for hearing a lot of things you don’t want to hear, not sure if ANY HA is smart enough to know what you want to hear and what you don’t want to hear because it’s so subjective and different between individuals anyway. Even a normal hearing person can’t pick and choose what they want to hear so you can’t expect any HA to do miracle in this department. About the only thing you can have your HA do is put it in a directional beam forming mode so that it’ll only pick up the sound in front and not in the back or around you. But in a noisy place, what you don’t want to hear is going to be all around you, including the front anyway.
The Oticon OPN in particular is designed to let you hear everything and expect your brain hearing to learn to tune out what you don’t want to hear and focus on what you want to hear. If you have expectation that the OPN should do this work for you instead of your brain hearing doing this work, you’ll have picked the wrong HA and be greatly disappointed in it. But if you embrace their “open” paradigm and are glad that you can hear everything and give your brain hearing time to adapt and train it to tune out what you don’t want to hear, you’ll be happy with the result after your brain hearing has been trained well enough for it.
Atom:
How long have you had the new OPN’s?
IIRC new OPN’s will automatically adjust themselves every day so you can hear more sounds each day for the 1st 7 to 10 days or so.
Kind of like ramping up so your brain gradually gets used to them. At my first follow-up visit after the adjustment time the Audi enabled all of the other functions - directional sound etc…
I too heard heard more 360 degree sounds on day 1 - like the “clicking” of my shoelace tips hitting my shoe leather when I walked down a quiet carpeted hall (now I know why all of my employees always seemed to be working when I came around!!! 
). You get used to it and actually enjoy being able to hear sounds if you want to. Give it a month or so. The audi can select the level of loud noise rejection so that if someone drops keys on tile floor you don’t jumps out of your chair.
I just got them a couple of days ago. One thing I’ve noticed is that the sound is more comfortable if I lower the setting to -3 on the iphone app. I’m going to give it an ample test; after all, I have a 30 day refund option. My hearing loss at high frequencies is severe. One thing I have noticed is that music over the blue tooth does not sound at all right. If I listen to it through ear buds, then it sounds ok. With the Opn’s, the bass seems nonexistent. I don’t listen to a lot of music anyway, so not a big deal. Mostly, I’m looking forward to hearing better at work. If it does that for me, then it will have been worth it.
If your audi didn’t make use of the auto adjustment feature available that Rocketmahn talked about, then manually using the volume control like you’ve been doing is the alternative to get gradually eased into it. I actually prefer the manual adjustment myself because you can control when and where to do the adjustment. The trade-off is that every time you put the OPN on you’ll need to change the volume to your liking. If after a few weeks you still like the lower volume better, your audi can set it to be your default volume. But the current default volume set is probably based on your audiogram, so give it some time to see if you can get accustomed to the current default volume first.
If your hearing loss is mostly at the high frequencies and your low frequency hearing is more normal, chances are that your fitter fitted you with an open dome to let the natural lows and mids come through so you can hear them naturally unaided by the HAs. If you wear an open dome, the negative effect of it is that the open vent will act like an open door and cause the lows and mids from your streamed music to leak out. And the receiver in your ear canal is already pretty small in the first place so it can’t deliver the thundering bass that you’ve come to expect from headphones designed for music anyway. Just plug your ears with your fingers when streaming music to your OPN and if it seems to have better bass then you’ll have confirmed that whatever little bass your receiver can already muster up has leaked out due to your open dome fitting. It’s just a trade-off for wearing open domes. I don’t wear open domes, I have a bass dome with a tiny vent hole, and I still prefer to wear my normal headphones when seriously listening to music because I already know that I can’t get the kind of bass my headphones deliver compared to what the receiver can do. But for normal TV watching from the streamer, with a closed dome I do get sufficient bass from the receiver so that it’s not a tinny sound.
Great tips. If you wear a custom receiver, how does the bass vary relative to the open and closed domes?
I assume you mean a custom mold and not custom receiver here because there’s no such thing as custom receiver.
don’t think the closed dome will be too much different than the custom mold if the closed dome fits well in your ear in terms of the bass sound. But the custom mold will probably have a slight edge. Both of them would probably have a big edge on the open dome when it comes to better bass and mids for streamed music. For normal unstreamed sound then of course the open dome will let un-amplified natural sound in while the closed dome and custom mold will produce more amplified sound.
Gotcha and yes you’re right. I had meant a custom mold. I’m still getting up to speed on the nomenclature. Thanks for the clarification!
I am currently trailing an Oticon OPN 1. I’ve been using hearing aids all my life. The audiologist only set up one general program so I can get acclimated with the aid. We will later add some programs. I am encountering a couple of issues with the aid that I hope can be cured by adding some preset programs.
Currently using Open double dome but could switch to one of the custom domes.
Biggest issue for me is that bass seems to get cut off, especially with music (mostly listening in my car). The bass guitar, bass synth and drums sound muffled.
My voice seems to sound like what it would sound like if the ears had plugs in them.
Lastly, it is hard to hear my wife while we are driving in the car. The road noise, car noise and interior noise compete with my wife’s voice, drowning her out. Her voice sounds muffled and soft compared to all the other sounds.
I went to my first staff meeting this morning and can happily report that people who normally mumble, can be heard now, compared to old aid.
My previous Oticon hearing aid and P3 setup for music, meaning it was set for the full range of bass through treble. I don’t remember however if noise reduction or gain were set on or off.
Here is my old audiogram, which is said to be similar to my new one (should be getting it soon):
Db/Hz 250 500 750 1k 2k 3k 4k 6k 8k
Left 45 45 – 55 55 60 75 – 105
Right 105 95 — 95 80 85 85 – 95
I would appreciate any suggestions for what I may be able to tell the audiologist for setting up the presets.
I’m thinking to do something along the lines of the following:
P1 - General but maybe more bass or something to allow me to properly hear myself.
P2 - Directional, for noisy environment like local Wegmans on a busy night.
P3 - Music, to hear natural bass and treble
P4 - Car, to cut down on all the noise.
I have Autophone turned on so I believe that does not need a preset. I will also be getting the TV Adapter 3, which I understand also does not need a preset setup and still be able to select it in the iPhone app.
Thanks for any help or insight anyone can provide!
Unlike more traditional HAs that offer many different programs, the OPN can be set with just one program that should be good enough for all situations. But it can be set to hold multiple (4?) programs if you wish, just not necessary. I’ll explain why later on below.
You said you’re using open double dome but I don’t really think you mean open as in having big vents on the domes. I think you’re talking about the power dome that has 2 domes stacked on each other without any vent at all. Based on your audiogram it seems like it’s most likely either that or customer molds (with no vent). That plugged up feeling you have is due to the occlusion effect due to no vent. You didn’t say what kind of HA you wore before, but I’m a little surprised that this plugged up feeling is new to you, because with your hearing loss on the low frequencies, I would have thought that you’d already be fitted with something with no vent, so you wouldn’t be a stranger to a sealed fitting already. But maybe whatever you wore before had some vent. You can try the bass dome with a single vent to help reduce the occlusion next time you see your audi. But I suspect a custom mold may work best for you, especially with your right hearing. I assume that the audi probably fitted you with a 105db receiver (or something even stronger if available) on your right ear already, because the 85db receiver is no match for that loss.
Not sure why you feel like lacking bass on the OPN. Probably something your audi can crank up a little more in your next visit. It may be that your previous HA had the bass cranked up so you’re used to more bass? It can also be the road noise while driving that’s masking the low ends for you. How does it sound if you just listen to music at home in a quiet room with a good pair of headphones that has good bass? Does it work better in that case for you?
If you’re used to noise reduction from your previous HA, the OPN doesn’t do noise reduction of ambient noise (like road noise, engine noise, fan noise, etc) like traditional HAs do. The strategy of the OPN is to let you hear all sounds, and your brain will eventually adjust and know what to tune out and what to focus on. But it’ll take a while for your brain become adjusted to that (maybe a month or two or more, depending on how often you’re exposed to noise).
That’s great to hear.
Like I said above, you don’t need multiple programs with the OPN because by design, it lets you hear all sounds around you (noise included). It does have noise reduction but on speech only (which is a very different kind of noise reduction to help with speech clarity), so this implies that ambient noises (like road noise or engine noise or fan noise) are not speech, so the OPN does not apply noise reduction on those sounds. Its philosophy is that your brain hearing will eventually learn to tune out what you don’t want to hear, so that’s the “natural” noise reduction your brain hearing will do for you. That’s how normal people hear selectively anyway. Per this explanation, program P4 for the car is not necessary.
The OPN actually does offer a directional mode that you can turn on for noisy environment, but if you subscribe to its “open” paradigm and let you train your brain to adjust and learn to tune out noise, then the directional noise reduction mode P2 is not necessary.
Because the OPN does not suppress/process sound for noise reduction, the general mode is just as good for music listening so program P3 for music is also not necessary. The OPN lets you hear everything all around you all the times anyway, which is what the music mode in a traditional HA does pretty much.
So now you can see why with the OPN, only one program P1 is good enough for all environments. Sure you can add P2 for directional since it IS available, although not necessary, but still nice to have. If you want max noise reduction (again, OPN’s noise reduction is applied to speech ONLY), you can either set that on P1 by default, or you can have another program like P3 for that, although I don’t see why just have it set in P1 already.
You’re correct that Autophone does not need a preset. The TV Adapter 3, once paired with your OPN, will install a TV mode of its own on the OPN, but you’re right that your audi does not need to add a program for it.
I am using a disposable power dome (forgot the proper terminology while writing last night) at the moment but could switch to using a custom dome but could go to something like the Lite Tip, Micro Mold.
My previous hearing aid was an Oticon Alta. Prior to that, I used an Oticon Epoq. Before these BTE aids, I used Starkey ITE aids for many years.
Maybe plugged up isn’t the right word. I can hear the bass but it sounds muffled, subdued, as if the full sound is being cut off. The other part of it is that aid seems to be favoring some sounds above others and “crowding out” the other sounds.
I’ll try listening to music in a room tonight.
I agree that the OPN is a bit different. I’m being strong and wearing it all day, every day rather than giving up.
Thanks for taking the time to explain all this. I really appreciate it.
When you try to listen to music in a quiet room with no external noise, I would suggest doing A/B comparison between your Alta and OPN to see how they compare, especially on the low ends where you perceive the muffling. Also it’d be interesting to pay attention to the bass performance between the left and right HA, just because your right hearing in the lows is much worse than your left, and I didn’t hear from you what size receivers you were fitted with the OPN. If it were the 85db receiver, it’d be under sized for your right hearing and for sure the 85db receiver won’t be able to give you enough bass amplification for your right ear.
The perception of the aid seems to be favoring some sounds above others maybe due to its constant scanning and rebalancing of sounds that it detects, depending the origin and distance of the sounds relative to where you are. It may also take a while for your brain hearing to adjust and get in sync with and get used to how the OPN does the rebalancing so that you can find it more and more natural over time.
With regards to your being strong and wearing it all day rather than giving up, I think you’re having the right attitude here and I think it’s critical to have the right attitude to get the most success out of the OPN. Some people may not like to have to deal with too many noise sources and come to dislike the fact that they have to hear everything and expect a premium HA to be able to snuff out the noises for them. These people won’t be successful with the OPN because that’s not how the OPN is designed with that kind of noise reduction in mind. Other folks embrace the ability to hear everything (including what they consider noise) and strive to learn to focus on what they want to hear and tune out what they don’t want to hear with their brain. On top of that, they also try to get as much opportunity to expose themselves to difficult listening environments as possible so their brain hearing will have more chances to learn and adjust. These folks will probably be more successful with the OPN and maybe will have a shorter period of adjustment as well.
OK, back after using the hearing aid for a month. Hearing aid is largely working out except that when I am in a room with a fan (summer is here!), the fan seems to dominate all of the sounds the OPN is bringing in and I have to fight in my brain to discern what a person is saying, more so than I did with my previous Oticon Alta. I do now have a second program that has more directional settings and that seems to be helping some but still need to work with the audiologist to fine tune this stuff. Any suggestions for what to tweak on Genie would be appreciated.
Thanks for all your help!
Adjust the simple noise reduction to max and see if that helps with the fan noise
I agree with Tony (Abarsanti) that you should ask your audi to turn on the noise reduction to maximum in both your default setting and your directional program. Sometimes the noise reduction mode might have been set to medium only. But I would clarify to set your expectation correctly that this will not reduce the fan noise when there’s no speech. But it should reduce the noise to help improve speech clarity when speech is started until speech is stopped. But after speech is stopped, you’ll hear the fan noise again just the same if there’s no speech.
Please, do not support updating OPN through the device FittingLink ?
Firmware updates CANNOT be done with FittingLink (it can with ExpressLink, though, or with one of the various Hi-Pro’s)
You sure about ExpressLink’s ability to update OPN’s FirmWare?
Here’s a link to >>Oticon Firmware Updater<< tool that says specifically, “Make sure that instruments are connected to the computer with a cable (HI-PRO 2 is recommended)”.