Has anyone had experience of Oticon speech rescue? Does it work pretty well? Thinking of asking audiologist to enable it on one side to see if it’s an improvement.
When it’s enabled can you toggle it off and on in the Oticon Companion app?
It depends on what you want from your hearing aids. Speech Rescue worked for me by making speech more prominent and understandable, especially in the difficult situations. But, I found that it made everything sound “unpleasant”. Nothing sounded like I thought it should, especially music. So, you should probably try it, but do it on both sides. He can set one of your four programs to have it on and another to have it off. Then you can choose in Oticon Companion yourself.
Big John
@Volusiano has a lot of experience. I’m no expert but I would guess that it would not be beneficial for you because of your asymmetric loss. You don’t want it on your left ear and I would guess activating in your right ear would be odd, but feel free to try it.
@MDB is right that your right hearing loss can probably use the help of Speech Rescue. But I would probably suggest that you have it enabled for both ears to make the experience more symmetrical, because it might be weird hearing the lowered sounds on one ear but not the other. You can lower the strength on the left ear so that it wouldn’t be too pronounced on the ear that you don’t need it as much. I would also suggest using the leftmost configuration (2.4) because it’ll be more in your audible range than the higher frequency configuration.
There’s no option to turn off SR on the fly with the app. What you can do is leave your default program alone, make 2 copies of it and in 1 copy, turn it on for both, and the other copy, turn it on for just the right side. Then you can now toggle between the 3 of them to see which one you like better. Then in your next visit to the HCP, just pick the best one and delete the other 2 to make room for other more permanent programs.
I personally find it sounding perfectly OK for music listening as well, but I guess everybody has their own opinion. The nice thing is that it gives you the option to leave the original high frequency amplification alone, so you can hear the real sound and only add the “lowered” sound on top of everything. And also it gives you the ability to adjust the strength of the lowered sound to be not very intrusive. Of course if you’re a DIY person, you can try and experiment with many things in many ways much more easily and quickly than having to work with an HCP through many visits. But that’s another topic of discussion altogether.
I personally have SR enables on ALL my programs, even the MyMusic program, and I don’t find it unpleasant and nothing sounds “inharmonious” to me. It might be intrusive at first for speech listening because the fricatives, especially the “s” and “sh” jump at you at first, but you have your strength volume adjustment to deal with that, and also over time, your brain accepts it as the new “normal” and it doesn’t bother you anymore. It really helps with speech, especially for the English language where the fricatives play a very important role.
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Thank you for the replies and suggestions. I will consider this when I next contact the Audiology department. Unfortunately the installation code for the NHS Oticon Engage does not add the Oticon Optim hearing aids that I have, so I can’t go down the DIY route.
My Speech Rescue only amplifies sound to 4500 htz, not sure why.
Below is chart for Speech Rescue. It shows clearly which part of the high frequency regions (the gray area, or the “source”) gets dissected into 3 sections and super-imposed onto the red “destination” region. And there are 10 different configurations to choose from to fit the destination region into the more audible area of your hearing loss. So it’s not like SR only amplifies sounds up to a certain specific frequency like 4.5 KHz, it does cover quite a range of high frequency region.
I think it’s to do with the high frequency bands being turned off which stops 5 and 6 K being amplified but could be wrong?
I consider my 5KHz and up frequencies as goner because I can’t hear them even with the highest available amplification of a 105 dB receivers. But yes, the beauty of SR is that you can have both the lowered sounds as well as the original amplification in the high end intact. So if you feel that you can hear the amplified high ends, then you should leave the High Frequency Band option to ON. With your heavy loss, though, I would make sure that you use the left most configuration 2.4 where there’s still a little bit of audibility left.
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I remember seeing it selected as 2.4 but don’t know what that means. Does that means I hear things at 2.4htz??
It means that it moves sounds in the high frequency range (between 3.9 to 7 KHz) down to the mid frequency (1.6 to 2.4 KHz) range, which is where you have better audibility, so that you can hear those high frequency sounds better in your more audible range of hearing.
The 2.4 is just the name they give to that configuration that corresponds to the lower possible destination frequency range they can have, between 1.6 and 2.4 KHz.
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